A few pictures

I'm trying again to send a few pictures - we'll see if it works this time.  This is Crystal again, by the way.  So far, I have been unsuccessful in getting them to post to the blog via email.  I can't caption each picture, but they're from the Great Wall yesterday, plus one picture of our guide, Cindy, with "Ron" the pear.  She thought the pear was so funny, and she called him "Mr. Ron."  Everybody else in our group thought it was pretty funny too.  They were probably jealous because they wished they had a Mr. Ron!

We have a very uneventful morning ahead of us.  We got up at 5:30 and got ready for the day and then ate breakfast around 6:30.  We like the breakfast buffet!  Got back to our room, and we're basically just hanging out until checkout at 1:00.  We got to Skype with Melonie, Adam, Drake, and Levi (my sister and her family in Great Falls, MT) for a little while this morning, but our internet connection is so bad it didn't work very well.  It was still fun to talk to them, even just for a bit.  We need to re-pack our bags for our flight this afternoon, but that won't take long.  We might venture outside to walk around and check things out, but it's pretty smoggy and hot today.  We got lucky with having such a beautiful day yesterday for our sightseeing!  I've been having a constant sore throat since we got into Beijing, except it got better for a little while when we were at the Great Wall . . . I think it might be a reaction to the smog and smoke that is everywhere around here.  I'm hoping that's the case anyway, and not that I'm getting sick.  We will see when we fly out of here and get to Hangzhou.  Our guide said that where Beijing is like the emperess, Hangzhou is like a lovely lady, and that we will like Hangzhou a lot.  I'm not sure about some of her analogies, but I think she was saying that Beijing is big and important and fancy but Hangzhou is also nice but not so big and crowded.  Maybe we'll find out when we get there what she meant by "a lovely lady."    

Well, that's about all for now.  It's a little before 9:00 on Sunday morning for us, and almost 6:00 on Saturday evening for most of you.  We don't know exactly what time we get to meet TongJie tomorrow, but we're really excited!  Hopefully we'll be able to have internet access in our hotel in Hangzhou so we can update our blog tomorrow sometime after we get him.  We'll be excited to share how things are going.

One other thing . . . if you're reading this post and you have a chance to drop us a line, could you email to let us know if the pictures showed up on our blog with this post?  There should be 4 pictures.  Like I mentioned before, we're unable to connect to Blogger, so I won't know for sure if the pictures made it unless someone tells me.  Thanks!