The Great Wall & Changsha

Marc, Dianne, & Mao at the Forbidden City entrance

The Great Wall adopting families

Dianne climbing the Great Wall - least threatening Mongol hoarde ever

Saturday started at 2:00 a.m, after 7 hours of sleep; these early mornings may stick around for a while. So instead we read, watched a movie, hopped online, and waited for the hotel breakfast to open. Today was tour day! We've been looking forward to tour day to see the Forbidden City & the Great Wall, and just as much to meet the other Great Wall families who are adopting with us.

We'd been told to gather after breakfast in the lobby before departing on our tour with our guide Grace, and we met the other five there. They are from New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and yup.............Cedar Park, TX. And four of the five families (including Shane & Elena from Cedar Park) are adopting girls with cleft lip & palate. Needless to say, we were thrilled to meet them. All six families are going to a province by themselves to adopt, and we'll all meet again this coming Friday in Guangzhou with our new additions in order to complete the final rounds of official adoption decrees and such before heading home. It was wonderful to be talking specifically about Dell Children's hospital in Austin with a family in China before we've even gotten Malia.

So off we went to the Forbidden City, passing right underneath Mao's portrait. It's a city. It's forbidden. It's big. It's got a lot of rooms. Mostly unfurnished. We downloaded The Last Emperor to Marc's laptop, and we were wishing we had watched it again before we went in. Mainly, it's the size of the place that gets you. Pagoda after garden after plaza and on and on. It's pretty dang impressive. The day before we were wondering whether the lack of attention to Dianne & me might be due to the lack of blonde hair. Yup. Elena has blonde hair, as does a 4 year old named T.J. in the New Jersey family. All day long they were asked by locals to have a picture taken with them. Rock stars, literally all day.

Just as the day before, one of the big impressions we got was that there are a LOT of Chinese now with money interested in spending it in their nation's capitol. Absolutely huge numbers of families from places like Xian, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Tianjin, and elsewhere visiting the Forbidden City like a family from Cleveland might go see the Smithsonian. The only thing that seemed to be forbidden was Starbucks, for which we were not surprisingly thankful.

We finally made it through the entire city from south to north, and headed out to the Great Wall at Juyongguan. The wall here is less meandering as in Badaling, and much more of a narrow climb...........which of course we did, all the way to the highest point in that section. It took about an hour up, and 30 minutes down. Let's just say that only two families made it, and both were from the Travis/Williamson county area. :) I'd say the picture of Dianne above was worth the fairly strenuous hike. On the way back we passed by the 2008 Olympics sites, before heading back to the hotel at 6:00, where we promptly crashed.

And wouldn't you know it, Sunday started at 2:00 a.m.......again. This time, we spent the early morning watching The Last Emperor and basically repeating our tour route by way of the 1980s epic. At 5:30 we headed down to the lobby again to meet all of the families for the trip to the airport; all of our flights left that morning, and we wouldn't see them again for another 5 days. Our flight to Changsha was a fairly uneventful 2 hours south, the highlight of which was being able to watch the Yangtze flow east from 30,000 feet above right before landing.

Our guide Amy met us at the Changsha airport and drove us to the Dolton hotel, where we are now and will be for the whole week. And guess what? Tomorrow morning is the big day. Malia will get on a train from Huaihua tonight, and at 9:30 a.m. we'll have our "gotcha" day. How will she react? Will she take to us? Will she protest? Who knows? Anything and everything is expected and acceptable. :)

The two best things about the hotel? They put all the adopting families on floor 30, and have built a playroom for the adopted kids on that floor. Also, $15 massages in the health room. We plan on doing the latter tonight, and the former every day the rest of the week.