Pics & vids on Flickr!

Just a quick note to say that I've uploaded more pictures and videos to Flickr, which can be viewed here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7303330@N03/collections/

Click on the above link (hopefully it shows up as a link), then click on "Scheer Adoption 2010" to bring up the collection of pictures from our adoption.

I also want to say that we've been *very* busy, which is why this blog has fallen way behind.  Plus, our Internet access is spotty at times, which doesn't help matters (it can take hours and hours to upload pictures and videos).  I might be updating this blog much more until we get back to the States.  (Sorry!)

Saturday May 15 - Tienanmen Square, The Forbidden City, more Chinese food, Olympic buildings and The Great Wall of China.

Today was great.  We:

- Saw Tienanmen Square : It was nice to see, but (without taking anything away from it), there wasn't much to see there -- it has tremendous political importance, but is visually not that stimulating.  Basically, its a big, well, square.  Lots of people.  Saw the outside of the Chairman Mao Mausoleum -- it's a big building, and his body is on display in there.  You can spend several hours standing in line waiting to get in to see him, then you get to see him for about 1 minute.  Needless to say, we did not do this (it would have prevented us from doing some of the other things we had planned for the day).

- Saw The Forbidden City (see picture above) : This was right across the street from Tienanmen Square.  It was pretty neat, and very big.  The buildings looked a lot like the ones we saw at the Summer Palace (no real surprise there).  It took a long time to get through the city (all walking outside or through arches, etc).  There was a very nice Royal Garden (or something like that) at the end.  Neat trees and rocks and such.

- Went to lunch at a nice Chinese restaurant and had a variety of Chinese food, including Peking Duck.  All good stuff.

- Stopped by for a quick look at the Birds Nest stadium that was built for and used in the 2008 Olympics.  We couldn't get too close (didn't have much time to spend there), but were able to take some nice pics of it from a distance, plus were able to drive by the Water Cube and a couple other Olympic buildings.

- Climbed the Great Wall of China!  This was the highlight of the day for me.  We climbed pretty high up (up to the third tower), and the only reason we stopped was because we had to head back down to meet at the bus.  I really enjoyed climbing the wall as well as taking in the scenery.  We took lots and lots of pictures and movies.  When we get back home, I'll have to create a DVD or two (or five) of pictures and movies that we took...

Speaking of pictures, I've started putting some pictures up on Flickr, and they can be accessed via the following website:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7303330@N03/collections/72157623972227053/

It takes a lot of time to go through all the pictures we have, and I don't want to spend too much time on the computer every day, so I might not get the majority of the pics up until we get back home (sorry!).

And, I have to say this again...  Everywhere we go, people continue to want to take Danny's picture.  But at least he's starting to get used to it!  LOL!!  It's amazing.  Our tour guide was saying she thinks it's because he's a cute kid (no arguments from me!) with a big smile, and he has curly hair, which is something that Asians aren't used to seeing.  It wouldn't surprise me if his picture shows up on a billboard somewhere in China...

Today Bonny, Danny and I wore our "Soma FM" t-shirts (Soma FM is an Internet radio station based out of California, and if you send them a donation, they will send you a T-shirt; I've been donating to them for a few years now, so we've been collecting Soma FM T-Shirts, and today we all wore ours).  Today people were wanting to take pictures of all three of us!  It was really bizarre (in a good and funny way).  And a few times as we passed some young (20-something) Chinese people, they pointed to our T-shirts and started chattering excited -- I can only guess that they recognized the Soma FM logo and were (pleasantly) surprised to see it on our T-shirts.

I also want to say that the Chinese people have been extremely nice to us, and they try to help us when we ask for assistance -- we usually can muddle through it using body language, etc.  The trip has been very enjoyable and relaxing -- way more than I was expecting.  I'll admit I was more than a bit nervous about being in a strange land and not being able to speak the native tongue, but the kindness of the people has really put me at ease.  I would love to come back and spend more time visiting China -- there's so much to see that you could come back many times over many years and still only scratch the surface of the culture and history of China.

Chinese chess.

As we walked through the Hutong Village, we saw a number of people playing a board game with large pieces.  It turns out it was Xiangqi, or what is commonly called "Chinese Chess".  (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi for more info.)

Hutong Village residence.

Here are some pictures of the residence at the Hutong Village.  One of the pics is a model of what the village would have looked like in ancient times, and the other is a picture of the courtyard today.

Drums at Hutong Village.

Here's a shot of the steep stairs and drums at the top of the temple in the Hutong Village.  I have a video of these guys playing the drums (I will try to upload the video to Flickr).

Friday May 14 - Temple of Heaven, Hutong Village and Chinese Golden Acrobats.

We had a great day today (Friday) – we went to the Temple of Heaven, the Hutong Village (pronounced "who tohng" (think the word "tone" with a short "guh" on the end of it)) and saw the Chinese Golden Acrobats.

The Temple of Heaven was very neat. After going through some beautiful courtyards and buildings, we ended up at a large stone structure that was made up of rings at different levels (imagine a wedding cake, where each higher layer is smaller in diameter than the previous layer). At the top you go to the center of the circle and say prayers to Heaven for things like a good harvest, etc. (See the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_heaven)

Trivia fact: Circles and squares have important meanings in the Chinese culture – circles mean Heaven, and squares mean Earth. This is why religious structures are typically circular.

The Hutong Village was very different. This is where we got a glimpse of ancient Chinese culture. The roads are very narrow (I believe Hutong means "narrow streets" or something like that). The roads are so narrow that cars can't get through there, so you ride around in rickshaws! Rickshaws are two wheeled buggies that (in the old days) were pulled by a man. The ones in Hutong Village were a bit more modern – it was the buggy type of thing, but it was pulled by a man on a bicycle. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickshaw) Before we went on the rickshaws, we went up a big tower with 69 very steep steps. At the top you could see out over large parts of the city. In ancient times the monks (?) would hit a huge drum to sound out the time (like chimes at the top of each hour). The huge drum is long gone, but they have a number of very large drums, and shortly after we got there they did a demonstration – it was awesome, and very LOUD! LOL!

After the tower & drum demonstration, we walked a bit through the Hutong temple, then went on rickshaw rides down a couple streets in Hutong Village and ended up at a residence – the place is laid out such that there is a courtyard (probably 40 ft by 40 ft), and small buildings on each side of the courtyard. Each building had one or two rooms. Basically, the whole area made up a house – on the north side was the master bedroom and a study. On east side were two bedrooms. On the west side was the kitchen and some other rooms. (I don't remember what rooms were on the south side of the courtyard.) This is the layout of the traditional, typical Hutong residence. There weren't any bathrooms there – you had to use a common bathroom down the street. Imagine being in the dead of winter and having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night (or even going to the kitchen) – you'd have to put on a warm winter coat just to go to the bathroom or kitchen or such! Quite a different lifestyle...! Oh, normally there would have been two additional courtyards – one north of the north rooms, and one south of the south rooms, but in the residence we visited, those courtyards were long gone.

After the residence, we took the rickshaws back to where we started, then went to see the Chinese Golden Acrobats. We've seen the CGA a couple times back in Chicago, but this program was different – they had some live birds flying around above the audience. It was quite a fun time. After the show, we went back to the hotel and collapsed.

Tomorrow we are going to the Great Wall, and other things. Tomorrow is going to be long, then we will try to hit the sack early because we will be leaving very early Sunday morning to go to Nanchang.

Scooters for sale.

Oops...  I forgot to include a picture of the scooters they were selling at the Carrefour in the previous post -- here they are...

Dollars and Yuans -- Making Cents of it all...

The currency used in China is the Yuan (pronounced "you-ann"). The current exchange rate is approximately $1 US to 6.84 Yuans. That means that 1 Yuan is worth about 15 cents. This can get you a lot of buying power. As previously mentioned, bottle water is cheap. A local store (the Carrefour in Beijing) had bottled water for anywhere from 0.8 Yuans a bottle to 1.2 Yuans per bottle, which works out to 12 cents to 18 cents a bottle!

And at the same Carrefour, they had electric mopeds (the type you commonly see driving around the city streets) for 1699 Yuans to 1899 Yuans – or $249 US to $278 US! I want one!!! LOL!

But, some things are actually cheaper in the US. Last night we were at a different store, and most prices were very cheap (Danny bought a set of army men and tanks for 9 Yuan, or $1.32), but the computer products were more expensive than they are in the US. For example, before coming to China, we bought a Netbook for around $250, and the Netbooks at the local store here started at $400 US. Interesting!!

Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink!

It's interesting that you can't drink the tap water anywhere – not even in these fancy 5 star hotels! And the locals don't drink it, either!  They boil it first or just drink bottled water.

Above is a picture of the sign in the bathroom at the Radisson hotel we stayed at in Beijing. But not to fret – the hotels give you complementary bottles of water. Plus, if you need to buy some, it's dirt cheap – like 12 to 19 cents a bottle – Waaaaay cheaper than the $1.25 you pay for the same sized bottle of water in the US!

Danny is Mr Popular.

As mentioned in the previous post, when we were at various places, people would come up and want to take their picture with Danny.  Well, that continues to happen...!  And when we were at the Temple of Heaven, at one point Danny sat down and did some drawing, and people would stop and stare at his left-handedness.  Above are some pictures showing what has been happening.

In the shop where these pictures were taken, the very nice shopkeepers kept grabbing some small item (a pot, a stone turtle, etc) and would plop it down in front of Danny to draw.  He would draw it, and as soon as he was done, they would whisk it away and set another object down for him to draw.  He just kept cranking out the drawings as fast as he could.  Needless to say, by the end of the day he was very overwhelmed with all the attention!  LOL!

Thursday May 13th -- The Summer Palace and more.

We're having a great time here. We went on a tour of the "Summer Palace" which is a huge, ancient palace and grounds – something like 600+ square acres! The Summer Palace was the place where the emperor and empress (is that word??) went to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. The buildings and grounds are beautiful. I think that the ceilings in most (all?) buildings are covered in paintings. Matter of fact there is a long walkway which has so many paintings that it's considered the largest (longest?) art museum in China (Beijing?). The grounds are gorgeous – lots of big, old Cyprus trees.

There's a big lake with an island in the middle. We took a "Dragon Boat" over to the island (see Danny's blog for a picture of a Dragon Boat).

Trivia for the day: If I remember what we were told, the first three emperors were really good – they were concerned with the welfare of the Chinese people, and tried to do things to better the living conditions in China, tried to help the people, etc. However, after the third dynasty, the emperors were only concerned with their own well being and just lived a life of luxury and didn't care about the people. The people, however, revolted and overthrew these dynasties.

I also want to say that our CHI (Children's Hope International) tour guide (Cindy) is just fabulous. She is very friendly and knowledgeable, and has been extremely helpful. Besides taking us on these big tours, she also took us to the aquarium on Wednesday, and when shopping, she's able to tell us a good deal from a not-so-good deal. ;-)

The people in China have been very friendly. I wasn't sure what to expect, but we have been welcomed with open arms. It's fun to try to communicate with people who don't speak English (and I can't speak Mandarin). One time I had to go to the local shopping center (the Carrefour) to buy some swimming goggles for Danny, and I had to try to explain to one of the sales people, who didn't speak English. I used body language (like pretending I was wearing goggles, and diving into a pool) to say I was looking for goggles for swimming. I felt like I was playing charades, but it worked! LOL!

We've been taking a lot of pictures, and we want to get them up on the blog. However, it's interesting to see that a bunch of the Internet is blocked here in China such as blogs (blogger, blogspot, etc) as well as Facebook. It is possible to post to blogspot using their email option – you need to configure your blogspot settings to accept posts via email, then you email to a special blogspot account, and the text and images are automatically posted to your blogspot blog. This works, but has a few limitations such as not being able to edit the post after sending it to the blog, and you cannot configure where your images will appear in your post (they appear at the top, above the text). I've also discovered that you're also limited to the size of the email; I've found that sometimes I can only include 2 pictures, maybe 3. However, Flickr seems available, so I think I'll put our pictures up there and just put text on the blog (or text plus a couple pictures).

Hmmmmmm... When we get home, maybe I'll setup a blog site (strictly for people doing international adoptions) on one of my servers... Of course, that's presuming that I'll have time – we are adding a sweet little baby girl to our family, but I'm *sure* I'll have tons of free time on my hands......... ;->

Speaking of taking pictures, we experienced something we didn't expect – Asian people came up to us and wanted to take Danny's picture! After the third or fourth time of this, I asked our tour guide what this was all about, and she thought that the tourists were Chinese people from different parts of China, and they were fascinated with Danny's cute smile and his locks of curly hair.

Also, at one point he was sitting down doing some drawings (for homework), and people stopped and stared at him. Danny is left handed, and (as our tour guide explained) most Chinese are right handed (they are taught to be right handed even if they are predisposed to being left handed) so it is very unique to find someone writing or drawing with their left hand. Again, a bunch of people took Danny's picture, and some even posed with him. Very funny!

Tomorrow we're going to the Temple of Heaven and Hutong village (prounounce hoo-tone) and will see the Chinese Golden Acrobats.

Wednesday, May 12th - Aquarium, etc.

( First off, my apologies for not keeping this blog up to date.  We've been running around like crazy since arriving in Beijing, and any free time I have has been spent updating Danny's blog (http://www.dannyschinatrip.blogspot.com/).  I will do my best to get information on this blog, but please be patient if it falls behind... )

On Wednesday we went to the "Blue Zoo" aquarium here in Beijing.  It was not nearly as big as the Shedd aquarium, but it was very nice and had some things that we had not seen before (check out Danny's blog for pictures of the Goblin shark!).  It was a good place to go to on Wednesday as we were recovering from jet-lag, etc.

After the aquarium we went back to the hotel and swam, which was nice and refreshing.  All in all, Wednesday was a pretty low-key day -- just what we needed.  :-)

Some things are amazingly cheap here.  We went to Carrefour, which is a shopping store just around the corner from the hotel.  I was amazed at the prices.  For example, you don't drink the tap water here in Beijing (if you do, you'll probably get sick), so you need to drink bottled water  Well, bottled water is around 0.8 to 1.2 Yuan per bottle, which translates to 12 to 18 cents per bottle!  Way cheaper than bottled water in the US.  We also saw a scooter (moped) in Carrefour for sale for 1899 Yuan, which is $277 (US) -- again, very inexpensive!  (I want one of these mopeds!!!)  And they sold little painted turtles (just like the kind I used to get when I was a kid growing up back in Iowa), plus little colored frogs and cute little puffer fish.  Each of these cost just under $2.00 (US) a piece.

We went out to dinner a local Chinese restaurant (Hua Jia Yi Yua), and the prices were incredibly cheap -- so cheap that we thought we weren't ordering enough food, but when the food arrived, we had *way* too much!  A big plate of pan fried noodles was around $5 (US), and (if I'm remembering correctly), the chicken and pork dishes were also only $5 (US) each.  The total was only 335 Yuan, which is $48.99 (which meant $25 per family), and it was really good food   Amazing...

[ By the way, I think I will be putting most of our pictures up on Flickr instead of attaching them to the blog -- this is because we cannot go in and directly edit the blog; we can only post things by sending emails to the blog, and we're limited by the size of the files we can send/post via email.  There are a number of sites you cannot access from within China, including blogger.com. blogspot.com, facebook.com, etc... ]

Another Siberia pic + Flight route.

Here's another picture (out the airplane window) of Siberia.  Even though it might not look like it, the dark areas are ice, not water.  See the bright spot close to the center of the picture?  That's the sun reflected in the ice!  As the plane flew over the ice, the sun would be reflected on the patches of ice that weren't covered with snow.  Very cool and very surrealistic.

The second picture is a picture from one of the monitors on our flight from San Francisco to Beijing -- when they weren't playing movies, they would show our route and our position along the route.  At one point, the temperature outside the plane was -78 degrees Fahrenheit!

Pictures of Siberia.

Here are a few pictures of what it looked like when we were flying over Siberia.  It was incredibly beautiful (the pictures don't do it justice).
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Monday May 10th, 2010 - Heading for China.

Today we headed for China. Not much to talk about -- just to say the flights (Chicago -> San Fran -> Beijing) were uneventful. Although the SF -> B flight was about 12 hours long, it was very enjoyable -- it seemed like the first time in weeks (months?) that we didn't have to run around and do anything; we just relaxed on the flight, napped, watched movies, read, looked out the window, etc...

Speaking of looking out the window, on the way to China we flew over Alaska, the Bering Straits and Siberia...!!! (Now, if only I can figure out how to add a picture to this blog -- stay tuned...)

We have arrived!

Greetings, all! We have made it to China, and we're enjoying every minute of it.

(By the way, our apologies for not posting earlier -- we've had some techie issues that may now be resolved -- however, if you suddenly don't see any updates, we may be having more technical difficulties.)

So read on for an update on our trip so far...

We're China bound...!!!

...well, almost! We're still waiting on a few details, but if all goes as planned, we'll be travelling to China shortly to complete an adoption. 15 days and counting!

Stay tuned!

[...more to come...]