Guilin back to Beijing and a day closer to 'Gotcha'~!

Once again it was time to hop in a China flight from Guilin back to Beijing in preparation for the main reason of our visit to China!
It was about a 3 hour flight, and our friends Lynsay and Bill from the Morningstar foundation (orphanage) were kind enough to meet us at the airport and then
we went to an INCREDIBLE Chinese restaurant they had picked out. Chinese food will never be the same! It was wonderful. Lynsay and Bill picked
out most of the dishes and their precious children and John got along as if they had known each other their whole lives.

We have never experienced traffic as heavy as in Beijing. Lynsay and Bill told us that over 2,000 new cars a day were entering the streets of Beijing. It literally sometimes
takes hours to get from one end of Beijing to the other as we are experiencing during this trip. After we were dropped off at our hotel called the "King Wing Hot Spring", we said
our goodbye's to our sweet friends and prepared to meet the other families in our adoption travel group the next morning.

I think they see us coming and turn off the air conditioning when they see us. The King Wing was sweltering. According to the management, the air would not be
turned on until the day after we were to leave Beijing. Lovely.

The next morning we met up with the other families that will be receiving their babies this week! There are 3 families in our travel group (plus ourselves). One of the families has their son
with them (Jared) who is a year older than John. John is excited to have a new buddy for the remainder of the journey and John will also get to witness Jared meet his new sister for the first time!
This will be a once in a life time opportunity and let John have a glimpse into the world his own sister experienced 5 years ago.

The day was FULL of touring. You name it, we saw it. By the time the day was over my feeling was if you have seen one room at the Forbidden city, you've seen 'um all... at 9,999 1/2 rooms I would sure hate to clean the place! They believe that God in heaven had 10,000 rooms and they wanted to have just under that.

China is full of superstitions. They hang red ribbons on tombs for "good luck" and they put red banners beside doors, hang red lanterns on porches, and in the older areas they put a mirror above their front door to protect them from evil spirits. The library in the Forbidden City had a black tile roof because black represents water and would keep the library from burning. The large wooden doors in the Forbidden city had raised stone sills at the bottom because of the belief that spirits can't bend their knees and would trip coming in the door. These are just a few of the ones we can remember right now.

There were so many people it was hard to remain together as a group. In China you also experience the "first shove, first serve" rule. John attempts to be a gentleman and hold doors open for the 'folks' and they plow right past him and leave him standing there as they stare at him. He continues to do what comes 2nd nature to him but it's quite another culture here in the land of Asia.

There are many habits that we consider totally unacceptable in our country but are common place in China such as young children going to the bathroom right on the sidewalk and trash cans, or pointing and staring.