hope is the thing with feathers: 2018

Mom and Dad did a huge amount of planning, and all their work came to fruition - our family was blessed to travel with them, my sisters, and one of my brothers to China this summer. This is an abbreviated tale of our travels and a few photos for a taste.

It was probably crazy to think we could take two kids across the world, but it went really, really well. We are super proud of our children, and grateful to our family for being flexible and patient with our quirks and needs.

Home to Beijing:
TSA likes me so well they always pick my bag to sort through. Every. Single. Time.
The new-ish 787 Dreamliner is a pretty cool airplane. The children were particularly enamored of the built-in screens with free movies and games. Screen time limits flew away with the time zones. 13 hour flight and no sleep - but it worked. Our first views of high-rises after high-rises after high-rises on the descent to Beijing. Cleared a confusing set of customs. Met our guide and driver and drove through the night streets of Beijing to our hotel. Sleep - yay!

Beijing Day 1

Breakfast in the hotel dining room – delicious. Tried out rice congee, stir fried vegetables, fruit juices, kiwi-like fruit, bitter fruit of some sort. Met our guide and drove to a jade factory and saw how jade was carved, looked at impressive jade carvings (animals, ships). Silk thread artwork and jade dust artwork. Expensive jewelry. Dragons, turtles, charms, family balls.

Used first squatty potty at Great Wall – success! Up the Great Wall. BabE nervous about climbing up and down, had to be carried by Daddy. Hiked up and down as fast as we could after leaving the kids at an outcropping building part way! Humid and smoggy that day, got hot – sky heavy and hard to see any distance. The younger adults went a little farther, with the amount of time we had. Good leg work-out! Lunch at a tourist place – first family style Chinese meal, more squatty potties.

Back to Beijing, drove by Central Business District and many new high-rise developments, counted 16 tower cranes at one site.

Silk Alley Market – shopping area for tourists with bargaining expected. Everyone getting tired and starting to feel the jet lag. Sat outside for awhile and watched the driving - pretty insane. Took bus to restaurant and had Peking Duck and several other dishes. Everyone very tired and not very hungry (except me - I ate a lot of duck. It was delicious.). Back to hotel and bed.

Beijing Day 2

Breakfast in hotel dining room – delicious again. Tried cornmeal porridge. Met our guide and took a short drive to Tian’an Men Square. Full of people “but not that busy” according to guide. Gates, garden/sculptures, Great Hall of the People, Beijing Museum, government buildings, Mao’s mausoleum. Walked through square and saw Red Guard soldiers entering square for an exercise. Many gates and buildings in Forbidden City. Yellow tile roofs with creatures on the corners for luck and protection. Blue for sky. Red for good fortune. Beautiful and amazing scale.

Air much more clean and blue sky, had rained the night before. After Forbidden City, on bus to Hutong area (older area of Beijing where housing is still similar to what it would have been - multiple homes around a central courtyard). 3-4 families would share a courtyard, bathroom/kitchen, and help with caring for each other’s children and needs. Rickshaw ride through the Hutong. Many new cars parked wherever they would fit next to old houses and courtyards. Ate lunch at Hutong home fitted out for feeding people. Delicious vinegar potatoes, meatballs, dumplings, vegetables, etc. Stopped at local home and toured, son was an artist/calligraphist. Pet crickets and doves in cages. Large courtyard. Back to rickshaw to ride. Many adorable Chinese babies with their moms or grandparents. Area with a lot of “nightlife” – bars and even saw a tattoo parlor.

Back to bus and drove toward business district for an acrobatics show. First stopped for a tea ceremony and purchased oolong, jasmine, and fruit teas. Acrobatics show very neat – many acts, favorites were 8 motorcycles in a cage, hat switching, and 15 ladies on a bicycle. Really tired, back to hotel, ate noodles and snacks at Mom’s hotel room and off to bed. Did a little laundry while we had access to the washer/dryer!

Tian'men Square

Forbidden City

Artist's calligraphy brushes - Hutong

Tea ceremony

Acrobatics show

Tian'Men Square gardens

Hutong street

Beijing Day 3

Breakfast and met guide. Bus ride to Temple of Heaven and met Chinese friends at the gate. Toured Temple of Heaven and area gardens/grounds. Saw elders crocheting, playing cards, caring for grandchildren, flying big kites, playing a fancy spinning top game. Lunch at fancy restaurant with our Chinese friends. Delicious foods, had a chance to read menu, which was quite an interesting experience (“fried enema”). Returned to hotel and had short rest. Walked to a mall close to our hotel, ladies looked for dresses, men went exploring and found “snack street” with live scorpions on a stick, etc.

Fried Enema

Elders knitting/crocheting - Temple of Heaven grounds/gardens

View from Temple of Heaven

Back to hotel and met another family of Chinese friends - how fun to know someone in another country (by extension, thanks to parents and sisters)! Visited, lots of unknown words but very fun. Went out to a fancy mall restaurant for supper, walked past Jimmy Choo’s store on way in. Peking Duck (amazingly fast carving), whole fish soup, thousand year egg, lotus root, etc. Huge meal and so very well cared for and honored all day by our Chinese friends. VERY tired this night. BabE fell asleep in restaurant and when we carried her back to hotel, where she slept all night. Did some packing in the evening before getting ready to leave Beijing.

Scorpions on a stick

Beijing to Wuhan

Finished packing, ate one last nummy breakfast in hotel dining room. Bus ride to the train station where we met our guide, who helped us purchase tickets and navigate the LARGE station. Our first high-speed rail trip. So comfortable - just sit back and watch the countryside whisk by so very fast.

Ate snacks on the train for lunch and watched out the windows. Lots of wheat fields in the north, started seeing just a couple rice fields toward Wuhan. Several wheat fields had been harvested, looked like they were planting a second crop (what? Not sure…) and saw many people dragging/spreading out large hoses by hand to water? Irrigation ditches/fields along the fields. Very few tractors. Mostly three-wheeled cycles with attached carriers on the back. Many fields have structures to cover the crops, look a lot like greenhouses. Started seeing more factories and recycling places as got out into the country. 280-310 km/h on the train, blew through some towns, made 3 stops at bigger cities – very short – 2 minutes each about to get on and off the train. Arrived in Wuhan on time, our guide met us just outside the gate. Wuhan has 3 big train stations, we came in at most recently built one. Interesting to hear slight differences in accents/speaking in Wuhan compared to Beijing. Wuhan - China's Chicago - transportation hub for rail, water, and air - city is on Yangtze River, and home to many, many universities/colleges - large population of students.

Our guide talked about large French influence in Wuhan, many shops sell baguettes for foreign workers and business travelers. Also get a lot of German tourists. Can see some European influences in the architecture, particularly a lot of Art Deco designs in and out of buildings. Checked in at hotel and boiled up our first pots of drinking water. Walking to search for dinner and Carrefour. Fewer foreigners in Wuhan (only saw a couple European workers, I think is who they were), more people staring at us here and asking for photos or surreptitiously videoing/photographing us on their cell phones. Spicy noodle bowl and bone-in-chicken dish - tried using some Chinese to order, but not a smooth process! Driving much more aggressive/less chill in Wuhan – heavy on use of horns!

Boiling and cooling water for our water bottles

Wuhan

Street posters - balancing urban and rural economies

Train station

Wuhan streets

Wuhan Day 2

Breakfast in the hotel. Ate bean curd sticks (“stick of burning flesh” – which is what it looked like, kind of gross but tasted good), various stir-fried veggies (greens, lotus root), usual sausages and fruit. Mango pudding of some sort. Fungus and lychee fruits. Noodle bowls also big here for breakfast. Met guide in lobby, got on bus and drove to East Lake. Wuhan is a city of water - 1,000 lakes, as well as many rivers, including Yangtze and Han rivers. Beautiful lotus plants in East Lake, as well as many recreational boats, trails, bicycles. Families setting up tents and having picnics, relaxing along the banks. Walked around lake, enjoyed scenery, had lots of pictures taken of us.

Had lunch at big restaurant – able to seat up to 5,000 people in multiple banquet rooms of varying sizes. Popular place for wedding receptions, birthday parties, other parties (advertisements for 100-day parties for babies in lobby). So much smoking everywhere, particularly by men and drivers, smoking in buildings, fairly noxious in most places. Ate kung pao sweet potato (GOOD), fungus dish, mushroom dish, rice, etc. Staff left banquet room door open so they could pop by and see the Americans.

After lunch drove to the Yellow Crane Tower. Had been rebuilt multiple times due to fires, most recently in 1990s, now constructed of concrete instead of wood. Many pretty covered walkways and garden areas in the surrounding grounds. Five floors of stairs up to top of Yellow Crane Tower. Beautiful view of Wuhan and Yangtze River from top level, spent a lot of time up there taking pictures and ogling at all the high rises, business skyscrapers, and seeing the start of the potentially tallest building in Asia under construction – goal 626 m, currently at about 500 m, paused construction due to airspace concerns. Many roofs had gardens or at least some greenspace on top of them for plants/flowers. The Boy and Poppa paid to ring the Year 2000 bell below the tower – 9 strokes for good luck. Also threw coins into the space under the bell, trying to get them into the cup underneath (good luck?).

Drove to the Carrefour that Nana, Poppa, and Younger Little Sister visited during their adoption stay in Wuhan. Entire aisle of noodles and noodle cups. Big shopping malls with “usual” wares (jewelry, clothing) as well as some particular items. Seafood/meats/produce sections fun to explore. About $20 for 2 large bags of candy gifts, noodle cups, 5L bottle of drinking water. Bought ice cream bars (happy face on one side, sad on the other), took back to hotel and scarfed. Ate noodle cups and snacks in hotel for dinner that night. BabE had her first and only melt-down, but finally passed out and slept hard. Some of the grown-ups had a chess tournament while others caught up on sleep/reading.

East Lake (all above)

Carrefour - frog tank

Views from Yellow Crane Tower - looking out over Yangtze River

Tallest building in Asia - construction paused

Yellow Crane Tower

Wuhan/Xiaogan Day 3

Up earlier and breakfast in hotel dining room. Met guide and driver and took 2+ hour van ride to Xiaogan – northwest of Wuhan. Drove over Yangtze and Han Rivers. Wuhan was three separate cities divided by the 2 rivers, which incorporated together into one city around the 1920s. Revolutionary past – Sun Yat-Sen lived and organized revolts here, had a 100-year anniversary museum/building dedicated to him. Took a long time to get out of the city. Never became very rural, although started to see more/bigger fields and more spreading out of buildings – many 2 story buildings with shop areas on the bottom floor, living space on the top. Also saw a lot of abandoned buildings/factories, more than saw in other areas. Arrived in Xiaogan and the Social Welfare Institute – a new building and location from where Younger Little Sister lived exactly. Many other health/human services buildings in the same location, but orphanage had its own building.

Story of adoption visit to her orphanage is Little Sister's to tell. It was an honor to be there with her, in the place she had lived the first years of her life. Very emotional and special.

Back to Wuhan (2+ hour drive again for 80 km route). Stopped at hotel to refresh briefly. Guide and driver picked us up, went to “snack street” and found sesame/air balls for Older Little Sister, who had been hoping for them. Saw lots of interesting sweets and food on a stick being made and sold – octopus legs, chicken feet/heads, layered type of sweets being sliced very, very thin with a nifty chopping machine. Ate dumplings, noodle bowls, soy milk drink, and sweet rice “soup” at noodle shop. Kids had reached expert level with noodles/chopsticks by now! Shop ladies and patrons again staring/curious/photos/videos. Fun watching even fancy-dressed ladies (but mostly men) hock up loogies and spit on the sidewalk everywhere in Wuhan. Walked past many street sellers and across busy road to Yangtze River, saw where Chairman Mao swam in the Yangtze. Some people swimming, most with floats – very powerful current seen. Got on boat for Yangtze River cruise. Had declined the boat buffet, when got on boat, could see staff hand-washing big buckets of dishes in the back of the boat. Had fun watching the scenery on and off the river, big buildings, lights started coming on toward end of cruise. Nervous about kids falling into river, of course. Short van ride back to hotel, early to bed. Packing for travel next day.