China Part 1

Whew!
Last weekend, in case you didn't know, I had the opportunity to take a 4 day trip to Beijing with a group of 20+ ladies. I'll try to spare you all the details. You're welcome in advance.
The first day, we got on a bus at 5:30 a.m. to get to the airport, checked in all 25 of us, got us through immigration, flew 1.5 hours, and it was lunchtime! After meeting our bus and our tour guide, we went to lunch, then to Tienanmen Square, then the Forbidden City, then watched an acrobatics show, then dinner, and then finally checked into our hotel and hit the hay. All of us were exhausted! Many of us had not been sleeping well the couple nights before with excitement/nervousness about the trip and excitement/nervousness about leaving our kids for 4 days. I had never done that before! Of course they were in good hands, I was too busy to really think about it, and it all worked out.

I was surprised at how weird it felt (to me) to be in a communist country. "Big Brother" is definitely watching you, and hearing our tour guide talk about the "family planning" a.k.a a one child policy, and other things like that, gave me the heebie jeebies. The whole experience definitely made me appreciate being born in the USA and now living in Korea, where I feel just as "free" as I do in the States.

Another thing that made me appreciate being born in the US? Two words: squattie potty. A hole in the floor doesn't qualify as a bathroom where I come from, and for that, I am thankful! Now, the bathrooms in Korea are not always exactly clean or nice, but at least all that I've seen are above ground.

I posted a bunch of pictures on facebook, but here's one I made in photoshop that combined like 8 pictures in a panorama. This is in one square of the Forbidden City. It's a huge, old, palace, built in the 1400's that has housed 24 emperors over the years, along with all of their concubines and eunichs. In 500 years, a lot of history has taken place there. It's where the emperors lived and ruled from. I was not prepared to be so amazed or fascinated by these old palaces. But it was beautiful and huge and well, amazing! Completely impossible to describe, and boring to hear me try. The bottom picture is one I pulled off of the internet to show you how big the whole thing is - the circled part is where my picture is from.