Monday, July 8 - Back at home

We went for a walk to West Lake on Saturday evening and it was really beautiful, but we didn't want to stay out for too long because we needed to get TongJie and Ezekiel to bed to prepare for a long day of traveling home.

Lots of people at West Lake

Sunday morning, we checked out of our hotel and went with Sarah to the Hangzhou airport.  After getting our boarding passes and going through security, we said goodbye to Sarah.  She was flying home to Guangzhou and we were flying to Beijing before flying to Seattle.  I mentioned before that this was our third time having Sarah as our guide - she was with us when we got TongJie in 2012 in Hangzhou and she went with us to Guangzhou on that trip; in 2015 when we adopted Ezekiel in Jinan we were with Cindy, but Sarah met us when we flew to Guangzhou and was with us for the remainder of our time in China.  We feel like she has really gotten to know our family and it's pretty neat that we've gotten to be with her all three times that we've traveled to China.  She's a really good guide and hopefully we'll get to see her again when we go back when the boys are older.  We said goodbye and gave her a gift, and she gave us a gift of two books, one of well-known Chinese poems (in Chinese and English) with beautiful artwork, and one that tells about Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year.

Jeff reading one of the books that Sarah gave us while waiting at the Hangzhou airport

TongJie and Ezekiel playing with their new trains while waiting at the Hangzhou airport

At the Beijing Airport

Waiting in line to get on the plane - TongJie's stuffed panda from the orphanage was peeking out of his backpack!

We flew to Beijing (about 2 hours) and then got ready for our long flight to Seatac.  The flight to Seattle was delayed by almost an hour.  We left Beijing around 5:00 pm on Sunday and arrived in Seattle around noon on Sunday.  My parents picked us up at the airport and drove us home.  We got to our house in the late afternoon and it was so good to be home!  Jeff and I barely made it to 8:00 before putting the boys to bed and immediately going to bed ourselves.  I woke up around 10:00 to the sound of TongJie and Ezekiel laughing and playing in their room, with the light on.  They had both slept for a few hours on the airplane and apparently had gotten their "second wind."  When I went in to talk to them, they said "but it's the middle of the day in China and our bodies are used to being in China so we're not tired!"  Nevertheless, I was mean and made them turn their light off and lay down and try to sleep.  Eventually they fell asleep and slept until around 11:00 this morning.  We were all pretty tired today but worked on unpacking, laundry, etc. and Ezekiel and I went to Walmart and got new glasses frames for him.  Nobody took naps today so hopefully the boys will go to sleep a little earlier and we'll start getting our schedule back on track after a few days.  It seems like kids usually have an easier time adjusting from jet lag, so it will probably be me and Jeff suffering the longest.  I'm still working on putting the pictures from our trip onto the computer - we took a lot of pictures!  This was such a fun trip and I'm so glad we got the opportunity to do it this summer!  I'm also VERY glad that we did the trip at the beginning of the summer so we have more time to recover before going back to school. 

Saturday, July 6 - grocery store and old city market

We got to sleep in this morning, then had breakfast at the hotel and walked to the grocery store that Sarah showed us yesterday.  The hotel breakfasts are starting to get kind of old, so it's a good thing tomorrow is our last one.  The grocery store was fun.  We got some snacks for the kids, as well as some little snacks and things to take home.  It was a really nice morning for a walk, but later on it got hot.  We went to an old city market in Hangzhou with Sarah.  We had gone to the same market with Sarah when we were here in 2012 when TongJie was a baby.  In fact, when we first walked in the entrance of the market, the same Chinese saxophone store was in the same place.  Jeff had bought a Chinese saxophone there last time.  Today he bought an ocarina, which is a small roundish wind instrument usually made of clay.  The market is sort of a tourist place in Hangzhou, but pretty much all tourists from other parts of China, not many from western countries.  The boys bought a few gifts for friends, but we walked past one shop that had toy trains and they REALLY wanted to buy a train.  They were just cheap plastic toys that are the same as we could buy at Walmart in the US, so we told them to look around some more while we walked through the market and if they really had their hearts set on the trains we could come back.  The rest of our time in the market, all they could talk about was the trains, so we stopped on the way back through the market and bought them.  TongJie chose a diesel engine and Ezekiel chose a yellow bullet train engine.  They are so excited about thier trains and have been playing with them constantly since we've been back in our hotel room so I'd say it was a good purchase.  We had given them each some money to use to buy things for themselves in China as part of their Christmas present and now they've spent their money and have some really cool souveneirs.  We had lunch at a very crowded McDonald's in the market area.  There was no place to sit inside so we sat outside.  Jeff and I just had iced tea but we got Happy Meals for the boys.  Both of them ate their apples and drank their milk and took a few bites of the hamburger and fries and then said they were done.  We're all tired of all the restaurant food.  TongJie carried his fries around the market and munched on them for awhile but French fries have definitely lost their luster for now.  We walked though some areas of the market with some strange smells of cooking food, incense, spices, etc. and Ezekiel especially did not like the smells.  TongJie said, "its smells like . . . un-yummy hot dogs."  We all thought that was funny!  

We were all hot and tired when we got back to our room, and the boys immediately got out their stuffed animals and their new trains.  They only took a break from playing when we decided to go to the swimming pool for awhile, and as soon as we got back to our room they went right back to the trains and stuffed animals.  The water in the pool was not as warm as pools that we're used to in the US, but it was refreshing after being so hot.  

Our plan is to walk around the West Lake area (it's close to our hotel) in a little while but I figured I'd update the blog now since the boys are playing and we're going to be busy tonight with packing up all of our stuff and figuring out how to distribute all of the new stuff we've bought between suitcases (or "soupcases," as Ezekiel calls them) and trying to get to bed early.  Tomorrow we say goodbye to Sarah, fly from Hangzhou to Beijing, and then Beijing to Seattle.  Hopefully there won't be any flight delays and our travel will go smoothly.  We've had an amazing time in China, but we're ready to be home!  Ezekiel still says that he wants to stay for another month or year though.  :)

Jeff didn't take very many photos with his phone today and we didn't bring the tablet.

1.  A photo Jeff took of the Chinese saxophones

2. and 3. Photos of the market

Friday, July 5 - Orphanage visit and bullet train to Hangzhou

Today was an exciting day because we got to visit TongJie's orphanage.  It's in a new building in a different part of the city now, but still the same staff and the same Wenzhou Children's Welfare Institute.  We got there around 10:00 and we were immediately impressed by how big and nice the new building is.  It is bright and has lots of space, both indoors and outdoors.  There is a colorful playground and open courtyards for kids to play, and everything looks bright and cheery and kid friendly.  The orphanage staff who led us on our tour kept reminding us that it's not quite finished yet, and they don't even have a gate yet, which I guess is a big deal to them, but we thought it was a really nice facility.  Right away, we got to see YiWen, TongJie's caregiver who came with him when he was a baby on the train to Hangzhou when we adopted him at the civil affairs office.  The director, who also came with him and YiWen in 2012, has since retired and there is a new director, but YiWen recognized him right away, as did a couple of the other ladies who were leading us on the tour who had been there when he was in the orphanage.  There were a lot of hugs and comments about how tall he is getting and how he still has the same eyes and still has long eyelashes, as well as asking if he is doing well in school.  Everyone was also commenting about his Wenzhou shirt that he was wearing (from Grandma Scheibner), and one of the ladies gave TongJie and Ezekiel each a stuffed animal at the beginning of our tour, which was really nice especially for Ezekiel to have something to carry around with him.  It was a little hard for Ezekiel to have all of the focus on TongJie, but he really did quite well for most of the time.  We went on a tour of the orphanage and they said we could take pictures inside of the orphanage as long as no kids were in the pictures.  We saw and hugged a lot of little kids with special needs (mostly boys) who all were very happy to see visitors and came right up to us wanting to be hugged and picked up.  We couldn't talk to them other than "Ni Hao" but that was okay.  The orphanage is a lot like a school, and the kids are divided into different rooms by age and the older ones by developmental level.  We looked into some rooms where the students were in class just like at school and we didn't go in, but in the rooms with the younger kids we did go in.  They do occupational and physical therapy in small groups so we got to see some of that, and we went into a room with older kids who were doing art at a table.  One teenage boy, who is blind, played a song for us on the piano in the art room.  Sarah said that he has just graduated from middle school and they are getting ready to transfer him to the building next door for high school and some vocational training.  Jeff remembered that boy from when we were at the orphanage in 2012 and they confirmed that it was the same boy.  In the art room there was a whole wall of shelves with kids' artwork and crafts displayed.  All the rooms that we saw were bright and open with lots of windows and potted plants both inside and outside.  It was a very pleasant orphanage and it really seemed like the kids were happy and well taken care of.  There were a whole bunch of photographs displayed in all of the hallways, some of kids in the orphanage on field trips or special events, and some of kids who have been adopted with their families.  The lady leading the tour probably could have told us about all of the kids and families in the photographs if we would have had time, but she pointed out quite a few with special stories (those who had gotten adopted as older children, families who had adopted two children both from that orphanage, children with more severe special needs who are now thriving in families, etc.) and there was even a picture of our family!  It was after we had Ezekiel too, so that was nice that we were all in it.  Sarah took a picture of us next to the picture of our family.  One of the most special things, besides getting to see YiWen, was that we got to meet the caregiver who gave TongJie his name.  All of the kids who came into the orphanage in 2010 were given the surname "Sun," and all of the kids who came between July and September were given the name "Tong," but Mrs. Zhao chose the name "Jie" specially for TongJie.  It means "hero" in Chinese.  We took a picture of TongJie with Mrs. Zhao.  Then we got to look at TongJie's file from the orphanage.  Most of it we'd seen before in all the paperwork involved with his adoption, but there were some new pieces of information that we learned from his file, such as the policeman's name who filed the abandonment report, and the time of day (around 8:10 in the evening) that the police station got the phone call about a baby being discovered abandoned at the orphanage gate.  We also got a photo of him as a baby that we'd never seen before.  It's one of only two photos that we've seen of him before his lip was repaired, and it was when he was first admitted to the orphange so his hair hadn't been cut short yet - he was a baby with a lot of hair!  He was very cute.  TongJie was delighted to hear from his file that as a baby he liked to throw toys and he liked to watch TV!  He still likes to do those things.  :)  We had lunch at the orphanage with some of the orphanage staff.  There was a lot of seafood because Wenzhou is on the coast, and we had a special fish soup that is a specialty of Wenzhou.  The soup was good, it was kind of sour like hot and sour soup from American Chinese restaurants, but the broth was clear and it had large chunks of fish.  TongJie liked the soup, and he liked the shrimp even though they were hard to peel.  There was also a plate of mussels that were good.  TongJie did a really good job of trying things and being adventurous and Ezekiel tried bites of most of the things I gave him too, but he mostly filled up on the rice and pork.  There was a big bowl of cucumber chunks (not slices) with sugar and they were surprisingly good that way.

After lunch, we went to the Wenzhou train station and took a bullet train to Hangzhou.  We checked into our 7th (!) and final hotel of this trip, which is the same hotel we stayed in when we were adopting TongJie in 2012, and then went to Pizza Hut near our hotel at the boys' request with Sarah for dinner.  It was getting late, but we walked around a little bit so Sarah could show us a grocery store that we want to walk to in the morning.  We got back to our room after 8:00 and once again TongJie and Ezekiel crashed into bed as soon as teeth were brushed and pajamas on.  Tomorrow we're planning to go to a market because the boys want to buy a few more things and we've been suggesting that they save some of their money for shopping in Hangzhou.  They also really want to swim in the pool, so hopefully we'll have time for that too before our last night in the hotel.  This has been an amazing trip!  I wanted to add one more thing about this trip, in case I don't get a chance to tomorrow . . . this is a paragraph from our travel handbook from Sun Travel (the agency that plans the adoption heritage trips).  It's a little bit cheesy, but pretty much sums up why we wanted to take TongJie and Ezekiel on this trip and really what I feel like we've gotten out of it:

"If we had to boil it down to one thing, a heritage trip is about making your adopted children feel proud of who they are and where they come from.  This is one of the ways to show them that China, their birth country, is a magnificent place of ageless wonders, diverse peoples, and thousands of years of tradition, and to make sure that they know - through interaction with our exceptional adoption guides, friendly locals, and the kind people who cared for them before they joined your family - that love has no boundaries, and that they are important, not just in the U.S., but even halfway around the world!"         

Photos:

1.  Our family with some of the orphanage staff at the new orphanage in Wenzhou (YiWen is the one with her hand on TongJie's shoulder)

2.  TongJie and Jeff recreating a picture from when TongJie was a baby and we stayed in this same hotel in Hangzhou

3.  Ezekiel and Sarah deep in a discussion about the history of the Chinese dynasties at Pizza Hut

Thursday, July 4 - Wenzhou - TongJie's finding place and trampoline park

We didn't have to leave our hotel until 10:00 this morning, so we let the boys sleep in as long as they could. TongJie didn't wake up until after 8:00! We had a leisurely breakfast and then met Sarah in the hotel lobby. We are using a van in Wenzhou with a driver, sort of like Uber, but contracted with Sun Travel to be our ride while we are here. The first thing we did was drive around to try to find a store with super glue because Ezekiel's glasses broke last night in the airport. Luckily it was a cloudy, rainy day so not too bright outside, but still uncomfortable for him without his sunglasses. They are prescription sunglasses, but any sunglasses would help, so if we couldn't find glue we were going to just buy a cheap pair of sunglasses. We had tried taping them last night but this morning at breakfast the tape stopped holding and we realized it wasn't a good solution. I guess it was the area of town we were in, but there were no big stores like supermarkets or grocery stores around, so the driver kept stopping at these little hole in the wall convenience and gift stores and most of them were closed. Sarah ran in to a couple of stores with no luck, but on the third try she had bought some super glue and she fixed Ezekiel's glasses in the van. She needed to cut the tip off of the glue bottle and asked the driver if he had anything to cut it with, and he pulled out this big knife and handed it to her, it was kind of funny. So far, the glasses are holding up.

After the glue, we went to TongJie's finding place, where he was found when he was only a few days old. It was at the orphanage gate, but the orphanage moved to a new building just a few years ago, so we went to the old orphanage building, which is still there and has the same gate. Sarah says that the building is still used, but now as a home for elederly people. We didn't stay long because it was in a narrow alley and vans and cars were honking and trying to squeeze by, so we just took a few photos and then left. We drove around that area of the city and looked at the sights. Sarah said that a lot of the older apartments in the old area of the city have been abandoned because it has become too expensive to live there, but also too expensive to tear the buildings down, so there were a lot of abandoned apartments that we saw.

Next, we went to a mall in Wenzhou. It was a big mall and had a trampoline park. We stayed there pretty much all day. There was a fee for kids, but not for adults, and the boys got bracelets and then we could go in and out. They played for a couple of hours and then we went to a McDonald's in the mall for lunch. The boys were so excited to FINALLY be able to go to a McDonald's in China and they got Happy Meals. Then we went back to the trampoline park and stayed until 4:00. The trampoline park was really fun, and was great for them to be able to play hard and use up all their pent-up energy! I bet they will sleep well tonight. We stopped at a juice place at the mall on the way out and got juice that was really good. TongJie got orange and apple, Ezekiel got pineapple coconut, and me and Jeff both got fruit tea that had real pieces of fruit in it. It had watermelon, mango, passion fruit seeds, lime slices, and cherry tomatoes. Ezekiel's drink had cherry tomatoes in it too. We've seen tomatoes on the fruit plates a lot here, which makes sense becasuse tomatoes are actually a fruit but we treat them more as a vegetable in the US.

We got back to our hotel around 5:30 and took a trip up to the top (23rd) floor of our hotel to look out the window, then came back to our room and the boys are taking baths and playing. Ezekiel's hat was soaked from sweat and humidity from the trampoline park, and both boys' hair was soaking wet. I will wash Ezekiel's hat tonight and he might need to wear his other one tomorrow if this one is still too wet. It is SO humid here - everything feels damp all of the time. Tomorrow we get to visit TongJie's orphanage that is now in the new building. Sarah communicated with them and asked if his caregiver, YiWen, is still there, and they said that she is and that she should be there tomorrow. TongJie doesn't seem like he cares too much one way or the other about visiting his orphanage so it will be interesting to see how it goes tomorrow. He doesn't seem nervous or excited but I'm not sure what he's really feeling like. Ezekiel says he's getting ready to come home because he misses Albert and Caspian, our cat and dog. But then he said he wants to stay in China for another month.

Photos: TongJie at the orphanage gate, and two photos of the trampoline park at the mall. At least I think that's what they are, I can't really see which photos I am actually attaching. :)

Pictures from Wednesday, July 3

Some pictures from our day:

1. TongJie in the cooking class
2. A market area in the city of Yangshuo
3. On our flight the Wenzhou

Wednesday, July 3 - Cooking class and flight to Wenzhou

We took a Chinese cooking class this morning in Yangshuo. First we went with the teachers of the class to a real Chinese vegetable and meat market to buy the fresh ingredients, then to the restaurant where the class was. Jeff really liked the class and I liked it too but would have been happy doing something else just as much. TongJie and Ezekiel had fun at first because they got to help with chopping, adding ingredients, and mixing, but when it came time for the actual cooking, it wasn't very fun for them. It got so hot with all of the cooking stoves on, and it was too crowded and fast-paced for them to actually help with any of the cooking, so we had them sit at a table right outside the room we were in. We ate what we cooked for lunch and it was really good. Jeff's favorite was the Kung Pao Chicken, my favorite was the eggplant dish, and TongJie liked the dumplings. Ezekiel filled up on rice and watermelon and only ate a little bit of dumpling and mushroom - everything else was too spicy for him, even though we tried to make it not very spicy.

We said goodbye to our guide for Guilin and Yangshuo, David, after lunch, as well as most of the other families. Then we rode in a big van with the From family (Greg, Cathy, Maybel, and Emily), Sarah, and all of our luggage to the Guilin airport. The Froms are from the Seattle area and they are the family we met right at the beginning of our trip who was on the same flight as us to Beijing. TongJie and Ezekiel have loved hanging out with their girls, who are so kind and sweet. We hope we will get to see them again sometime since they live in Washington state. The Froms took a later flight to Shanghai (TongJie would have been a bit jealous if he wasn't so tired of traveling by now - he really wants to go to Shanghai to see the Shanghai tower) and we took a flight to Wenzhou with Sarah. Our itinerary was wrong on the time, and it was about a 2-hour flight and we arrived to our hotel around 9:00. The boys got to bed as soon as we got settled in our room. We were supposed to see TongJie's orphanage tomorrow, but Sarah told us that the orphanage had to change it to Friday, but it will still work to see the orphanage on Friday morning before we leave Wenzhou. Tomorrow we will go see TongJie's finding place, which is at the gates of the old orphanage building. The orphanage has recently moved to a new building, but the old building is still there, so I'm glad we get to see at least the outside of the old building. Sarah said that won't take very long, and we'll have the rest of the day free, but Sarah is going to try to find a park or somewhere for the boys to play. It was raining when we got here, so it might be raining tomorrow and maybe we can find something indoors. Our hotel has a pool but I don't know yet if it's an indoor or outdoor pool.

We're having a really hard time with the internet here and I can't get any pictures to attach so I'm going to post this without pictures and try to add some pictures later.

Tuesday, July 2 - Li River Cruise and Yangshuo

After breakfast we checked out of our hotel in Guilin and took the bus with our group to the wharf on the Li River and took a boat down the river to a small town called Yangshuo.  The boat ride was about 2 hours and the mountains and landforms were amazing!  We also saw water buffalo.  The boat had inside seating on two levels and inside it was air conditioned, but you could also go out onto the deck on the 2nd level and there was a 3rd level that was a deck on the top of the boat.  It was pretty hot and bright outside, but we were able to walk around and go in and out..  During the boat ride, Ezekiel had a very long conversation with Rick, one of the dads in our group, about his stuffed White Mouse (a.k.a. "Surprised") and all of his special powers like walking on his tail, jumping over rivers, curling up into a ball, etc.  It was really funny, and it was really nice of Rick to be a captive audience for so long.  If you know Ezekiel, you know how he loves to talk!  We got to Yangshuo around 1:00 and then had a long, hot walk to a restaurant where we all ate lunch together and then took a bus to our new hotel.  This hotel is different than all the other ones we've been in so far - it's more of a retreat center and sort of reminds us of the Sleeping Lady in Leavenworth.  Our room is rustic and we have a beautiful view out of our window of the Dragon River and the mountains.  

We didn't have anything scheduled for the afternoon so the boys played in our hotel room with their toys for awhile and then we went outside and sat with some of the other families along the river.  It is so hot and humid here that when we walk outside our glasses get fogged up, but it was pretty nice sitting in the shade.  Our hotel has bikes for people to use to ride around the area but we didn't want to get TongJie's hopes up after he was disappointed about the bikes at the Xian city wall so Jeff went to check and found that there were tandem bikes and bikes with kid seats on the back.  We lowered the back seat of the tandem bike and it was low enough that TongJie could reach the pedals, so he and Jeff rode the tandem bike and I rode on one of the bikes with Ezekiel in the kid seat on the back.  We rode around for quite awhile and had a great time.  The views are amazing, and we passed gardens and small farms, including rice farms.  I took lots of pictures with my camera but we don't have a way to put those onto our blog right now so I'll have to add some after we get home.  The boys LOVED the bike ride, and Ezekiel said he wanted to keep riding all the way to Wenatchee :)

This evening we had to say goodbye to one of the families from our group who will be leaving at 5 am to travel to the city of their daughter's orphanage.  It's coming to the time where everybody will be splitting up to go to their different cities, but the rest of us have tomorrow morning together before we go our separate ways.  The family that we said goodbye to this evening (Rod, Pia, Travis and Kendra), has been especially helpful to our family, always offering to carry things (and kids) for us, sitting with our boys on the bus and train rides, and just being really kind to everybody in the group.  TongJie was especially sad to say goodbye to Travis.  Tomorrow we get to take a cooking class in the morning and then eat what we've cooked for lunch, then our group will split up and go in different directions to visit the cities of the orphanages.  We will be traveling with Sarah to Wenzhou in the Zhejiang province, and then end our time in Hangzhou, which is the capital city of the Zhejiang province.   

Pictures:  1. On the boat on the Li River, 2. Lunch with our group, 3. View from our hotel window

Monday, July 1 - tea farm and a free afternoon

After breakfast this morning, our group went to the Guilin Tea Science and Research Institute.  They have a huge organic tea farm and we learned all sorts of interesting things about how tea is made.  We began the tour by picking tea leaves in the hot sun.  There were rows and rows of tea trees, but they look more like bushes because they are kept pruned so short.  We learned that the different types of tea (white, green, yellow, and black) all come from the same trees, but the leaves are picked in different stages.  The white tea is when the leaves are picked when they are very small, new leaves and they are much more delicate.  The black tea, on the other hand, is from leaves that are larger and more mature.  The tour guide from the tea place showed us some of the biggest leaves and asked if anybody knew if they used these leaves or not.  He said that they don't use the old, really big leaves except as a mulch for the soil, because they are bitter and don't have good flavor.  But then he said that some farms do use them to grind up and put into tea bags to sell to other countries.  The Chinese look down their noses at using tea bags to make tea.  I guess they are "tea snobs" the way some people in the US are "coffee snobs," ha ha!  But our new guide for Guilin, David, told us that Chinese people don't really know anything about coffee and if you asked most Chinese people what kind of coffee is the best, they would say Nestle instant coffee from the grocery store.  Anyway, after picking tea leaves for a little while, we learned how they process the leaves by kneading them and drying them.  Different types are processed differently - the more delicate white tea leaves are not kneaded and they are dried at lower temperatures.  Also, the higher grade teas are processed by hand, while the others are processed by machine.  We participated in a tea ceremony and tasted three different types of tea that were all very good.  TongJie and Ezekeil did really well and enjoyed learning about the tea and going to the tea ceremony.  Ezekiel was really paying attention and asked several good questions to the guide when he asked if anyone had any questions.  We bought some tea and let the boys each pick out a tea cup to bring home.  TongJie chose a white porcelain set with a cup, saucer, and lid with blue dragons painted on it, and Ezekiel chose a plain light blue cup with a lid and a mesh strainer that fits inside the cup.  

After having lunch together with our group, we had the whole afternoon and evening free.  This hotel has a pool, so TongJie and I went swimming this afternoon.  It is an outdoor pool and was right in the sun (we can see it from our room), so Ezekiel opted not to go because he knew it would be too bright and he and Jeff stayed in the room.  It is so hot and humid here and the pool was very refreshing!  When TongJie and I got to the pool though, a lady with video equipment was taking a video of a man swimming in the pool and there was nobody else in the pool.  At first I thought we wouldn't be allowed to go in because all the workers started talking to each other and to the video lady when they saw us, and nobody there spoke English.  One of the workers called someone from the front desk who spoke English and had me talk to her on the phone.  She explained that "today is a special day" because they are making a promotional video for their hotel, and then asked if they had permission for us to be in the video.  I said yes, and then they were happy to let TongJie and I go into the pool.  The lady only recorded for a couple minutes and then left.  I think they were looking for some footage showing it to be family friendly.  Later, when TongJie and I were still swimming, one of the hotel workers came to thank us for participating in the video and she brought TongJie a stuffed pig as a gift.  I guess we were just in the right  place at the right time!

The boys played with their toys in our room for awhile, and then around dinnertime we met up with Sarah and walked to a smoothie place because me and Jeff didn't really feel like eating a lot for dinner so we got smoothies.  Then we took TongJie and Ezekiel to KFC.  They've been wanting to go to a McDonald's here in China, but we haven't found a McDonald's close to any of our hotels but there was a KFC.  Sarah had already gone back to the hotel by then, so she wasn't wtih us and we couldn't figure out if they had kids' meals by looking at their menu, so in the end we ordered a couple of chicken sandwiches and fries for them to share and they were happy.  We walked around the area close to our hotel and it was really neat.  But it was getting late so we came back and got the boys to bed.  This area is really beautiful.  I wish we had more time to stay here a few more days.  There are mountains all around that are really amazing, and everything is green and there are trees everywhere in the area of the city where we are.

Pictures: 1. The tea farm, 2. Walking on the streets of Guilin (outside of good old KFC!)

Sunday, June 30 - Pandas, market, and travel to Guilin

I'm posting this on Monday morning here in China, but really it's from Sunday.  We got to our new hotel so late last night that we all just went right to bed.  Yesterday (Sunday) morning we had breakfast, checked out of our hotel, and our group went on the bus to the panda reserve.  It was about an hour and 20 minutes from Chengdu.  We saw a lot of pandas, and a lot of them up really close!  It wasn't quite like a zoo because the pandas have a lot more room to roam around, but they do have food and water provided for them, as well as air conditioned enclosures that they can go into because they like cooler weather.  Even though the reserve is a ways up into the mountains where it's a little cooler, the pandas still prefer it even cooler than it gets in the summer there.  It was cloudy and humid, and Ezekiel used his monocular a lot and was able to see most of the pandas.  We all had a lot of fun seeing the pandas!

Next we had lunch and then spent quite awhile in a really large market.  There were a lot of people there, but it wasn't a tourist area, so our group was the only group of Americans that we saw.  There were lots of neat stores and we bought some things and had fun walking around.  We've had a lot of Chinese people coming up to us asking to have their picture taken with us, especially lately when we've been in the less "touristy" areas where they don't see Americans as much.  Ironically, the Chinese people all want to have their picture taken with Ezekiel, and of course they don't realize that he's actually Chinese.  They love his hair.  Sometimes he gets upset when people try to lift up his hat, but he's usually okay with people taking his picture - I think he likes the attention.  Unfortunately, some of the Chinese people try to indicate to us that they want a picture of our family but not with TongJie in the picture, but we tell them that he's part of our family and usually put him in the picture anyway.

We went to the airport and had an evening flight from Chengdu to Guilin.  Our flight got in after 9:30, and it was after 11:00 by the time we'd all gotten our baggage, walked to the new bus, and drove the approx. one hour to our new hotel.  Ezekiel slept through the flight and everything.  The rest of us stayed awake, but crashed into bed as soon as we got here.  We were able to sleep in a little this morning and not be too rushed, so we're looking forward to another day of adventures!

Pictures of a panda that we saw at the reserve, and us standing by a horse statue at the market.

Saturday, June 29 - Bullet train to Chengdu

After breakfast, we walked to the Vanguard store (sort of like Walmart) because TongJie and Ezekiel really wanted to go there again before we left Xian.  Ezekiel later said that Vanguard was his favorite thing about Xian, ha ha!  We got some snacks and the boys each picked out a flip sequin shirt and then wore their new shirts proudly for the rest of the day.  We were on the bullet train for a lot of the day today.  It was about 4 hours on the bullet train from Xian to Chengdu.  We are staying in a really neat Tibetan hotel here, but unfortunately we'll only be here tonight and then we're checking out tomorrow morning.  Shortly after arriving at our hotel, our group walked to a hot pot restaurant nearby.  We have a new guide, Ray, in Chengdu (Tony stayed in Xian) and also still have Sarah with us.  The hot pot restaurant was really fun.  I took pictures with the camera, but we didn't take any with the tablet so I can't post them to the blog right now.  There were four different tables, and 6 or 7 people sat around each table with a boiling hot pot of soup broth in the middle.  The pots were divided into spicy and non-spicy sections.  The spicy sections were red with hot peppers and other spices.  There was raw meat and vegetables on the tables and you would add them to the boiling broth to cook, then everybody ladled some into their bowls after it was cooked.  It was really good, but very spicy, and I even mixed some of the spicy and non-spicy together so it wasn't even full strength!  Ray sat at our table and that was nice because he showed us how to do everything.  TongJie liked the non-spicy soup and tried some of the shrimp, crab, meatballs, and tofu.  He was mostly enthralled with adding things to the "stew," as he kept calling it, and watching everything bubble around.  Ezekiel did not even want to try any of the soup, but filled up on fried rice instead.  The boys fell asleep right away after getting back to our room and into bed.  Tomorrow we get to see the pandas!

We didn't take many pictures with our tablet today I guess, but here are pictures of Ezekiel and TongJie in their new flip sequin shirts from Ezekiel's new favorite store.  There is a life-sized yak (not a real one) in the lobby of our hotel but we haven't even taken a picture of that yet.

More pictures from June 28

1. On the Xian city wall

2. An impression of TongJie in a huge version of one of those pin impression things

Friday, June 28 - Wild Goose Pagoda and Xian City Wall

TongJie slept in until 7:00 this morning, but the rest of us were awake earlier.  I'm glad he was able to get a good night's sleep because he's been getting worn out by the end of our days.  We had some time between breakfast and meeting up with our group at 10:00, but it was raining and the boys really just wanted to play with their cars in our hotel room so that's what we did.  We were supposed to see the ancient Xi'an city wall this morning, but apparently they close it when it's raining a lot because it gets slippery, so our schedule changed a little.  We instead went to the Wild Goose Pagoda this morning, which we were going to do tomorrow morning, so we just ended up with a fuller day today because we still went to the city wall but it was in the afternoon instead, after it stopped raining.  The Wild Goose Pagoda was pretty amazing architecturally but I think the boys thought it was kind of boring.  Our guide, Tony, said that a pagoda is like a Buddhist library, used for storing historical documents and teaching.  There were a lot of other buildings that we saw with the pagoda as well and they were all really beautiful.  After the pagoda, we walked a long ways through a sort of downtown area that had a lot of shops and restaurants around the edges of a huge central area with lots of neat statues, fountains, trees, and food trucks.  We even saw a taco truck.  As we were walking, we stopped at a grocery store and let the boys pick out a snack.  Peppa Pig seems to be really popular in China, we keep seeing Peppa Pig everything all over the place, so they each chose Peppa Pig fruit snacks.  We had lunch with our group at a dumpling restaurant with the most dumplings of different varieties that I have ever seen.  They kept bringing more and more dumplings to our table and they were really good!  TongJie liked the shrimp dumplings the best, Ezekiel liked the pork and vegetable dumplings, and I liked the mushroom ones and also the pork and vegetable dumplings, but they were all excellent!  I don't remember which were Jeff's favorite and I can't ask him because he's not here right now.  We also had soup with tiny dumplings in it that the boys liked a lot as well.  Our whole family sat at the "kids' table" for lunch - they are a fun group to hang out with!

After lunch, we stopped at a huge market but we didn't walk very far into it because we only had 30 minutes to spend there and there were shops everywhere with just the kind of trinkety things that TongJie and Ezekiel love to look at!  TongJie bought a coin and Ezekiel bought a pocket watch with a horse on it - they are both very proud of their purchases.  Ezekiel has been using his watch to announce to everyone what time it is every few minutes.  We also bought a few other small things.

After the market, it had stopped raining so we went to the ancient city wall of Xian.  Xian is an interesting city because it has so much ancient history but it has also become very modern.  In the ancient times Xian was actually the capital city of China before it moved to Beijing, and it has a city wall that surrounds the old part of the city.  The wall is about 8 miles around and it is flat on top.  They have bikes that people can rent to ride around the wall, but unfortunately only adult-sized bikes so our family did not participate in riding the bikes.  TongJie was pretty disappointed because he really wanted to ride a bike.  Our family and another young man from our group were the only ones (besides our guides) who didn't ride bikes, so we walked together along one stretch of the wall and took pictures.  The sun had come out by then and it was really pretty.  It was interesting to see all of the ancient architecture on the inside of the wall with a backdrop of modern skyscrapers on the outside.  Sarah got an Uber to take us back to our hotel earlier than everyone else so we didn't have to wait around for the bike riders, which was nice.  The boys were ready to be back in our hotel room by then!  Jeff went to a concert this evening (called the "Tang Dynasty Music and Dance Show") with some others from our group, so the boys and I had a quiet evening in our room.  They aren't back from the concert yet so I don't know what it was like.  Today was another long day, but I'm kind of glad we had the schedule change and that we won't be going to the pagoda tomorrow morning.  TongJie and Ezekiel really want to go to the Vanguard department store again, so we'll be able to do that in the morning before we leave to take the bullet train to Chengdu in the afternoon.

Pictures are of the Wild Goose Pagoda this morning with some of our friends from our group, Travis and Kendra, and also at the market with TongJie and Ezekiel showing off their new purchases.   

More terracotta warriors (pictures)

Thursday, June 27 - The Terracotta Warriors

We took a walk in Xi'an near our hotel after breakfast this morning.  It is much cooler here than in Beijing and was grey and drizzling this morning.  TongJie said that it reminded him of Seattle.  We found a department store called Vanguard and bought some books and let the boys pick out a snack for the bus ride today.  We met up with our group at 10:00 and went on the bus to see the Terracotta Warriors, about an hour outside of Xian.  It was nice that it wasn't so hot, and also we were mostly indoors in the museum.  It was crowded, but nothing like yesterday at the Forbidden City and Tianenmen Square.  I took a different bag today and forgot to transfer Ezekiel's monocular into it, but today would have been a good day for him to use it since it wasn't so bright.  He didn't seem to be too bothered about not seeing things today, and was excited to see all the terracotta horses (his favorite!), and seemed to think everything must be a horse, or part of a horse that had yet to be put together.  The Emporer Qin had the terracotta army sculpted from red clay around 2,000 years ago to guard his tomb after he died.  It was discovered in the 1970s by a farmer digging a well and since then, thousands of soldier and horse statues have been unearthed.  I didn't realize how much excavation is still being done at the site even today, and it was interesting to see many pieces still in the process of being put together like life-sized puzzles.  Another interesting thing I did not realize was how close to the edge of the whole thing was the well that was being dug - if the well would have been just a few meters in a different direction, the entire army of terracotta soldiers might still be underground and completely undiscovered!  We went to a small factory of sorts that makes replicas of the terracotta army out of the same red clay and in various sizes.  We let the boys each choose a small one as a souveneir.  TongJie chose a warrior and Ezekiel chose a horse, they're really neat!  It was hard to explain to Ezekiel about the terracotta warriors - he kept getting confused and thinking they were real people who had died.  The replica souveneirs added another layer of confusion for him - if these were replicas, he thought they should be replicas of a real person (or horse), so he kept asking me if the terracotta warriors were "real."

We had a very late lunch (or early dinner?) with our group before heading back to the hotel.  This hotel has a swimming pool, so as soon as we got back to our room the boys wanted to go swimming.  A few of the other families had the same idea, and TongJie and Ezekiel had a good time in the pool, and then crashed and were sound asleep within minutes of brushing their teeth when we got back to our room.

It has been a lot of fun getting to know the other families in our group, and even though our boys are the youngest by far, they are having a great time hanging out with they others, and everybody has been super kind and friendly to our boys.  I think TongJie especially really feels like he fits in with the group and a lot of times has been choosing to be with the other kids instead of with me and Jeff all the time, which is quite something if you know TongJie.  I don't know if we were quite prepared for how long each day was going to be on this trip - every day so far has been packed with sightseeing and touristy things, which has been really interesting but probably a little above the attention span of our boys.  They would prefer to have a little more down time to just play with their cars and stuffed animals in our hotel room, walk to parks, and swim in the pool, but overall they are taking these long days in stride very, very well.  So far, at least . . . we'll see how we are all doing by the end of our trip!

Wednesday, June 26 - Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City

We all slept pretty well last night, and a good thing because today was a long day!  We had breakfast, packed up our stuff, checked out of our hotel, and were on the bus with our travel group at 8:30 to head to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.  I've seen pictures of Tiananmen Square before, as well as the Forbidden City, but I had no idea how huge it was in real life!  It was amazing to see the buildings up close and to stand in the square and see how vast everything was.  The Forbidden City was built in the span of only 14 years, which is also crazy to imagine.  It was very crowded today, but our guides said that sometimes it's even a lot more crowded.  It wasn't quite as hot, but still pretty hot to be walking around with hardly any shade.  It was a little stressful for me because of all the people.  I felt like I constantly had to be on high alert to make sure we didn't lose sight of one of our kids.  We had two guides again today, Cindy and Sarah, and that was really helpful because Cindy was leading the tour and explaining all of the history while Sarah was making sure everyone was with the group and bringing up the rear (usually us!).  We all had an ear piece so we could hear Cindy as she was talking.  Tiananmen Square is right outside of the Forbidden City so we went directly from the square into the "city."  It is called the Forbidden City because in the ancient times, only the Emporer and his family and slaves were allowed to go inside the city walls and it was forbidden to everyone else.  TongJie and Ezekiel have been doing great so far on our trip, but Ezekiel got frustrated a few times today because there were a lot of details he couldn't see.  We brought his monocular and he used that a few times, but when it's too bright even his monocular is pretty useless.  Everything is paved with light colored cobblestones and in that big open area it was just really bright.  Luckily the buildings are gigantic, so he could at least see those!  By the time we got through the Forbidden City, we were all pretty tired.  

We took the bus to the train station and got on a bullet train to head to Xi'an.  Cindy had told the group that we would get to the train station and have time for lunch before getting on the train, and she even said there was a McDonald's there, so TongJie and Ezekiel were really looking forward to McDonald's for lunch.  As it turned out though, we had to wait a long time for our bus and didn't get to the train station with enough time to spare, so nobody even got to have lunch at all.  Luckily we had brought a lot of snacks and we were able to buy some more snacks on the train, but the boys were disappointed (and hungry!) but they were troopers on the train anyway.  It was about 4.5 hours to Xi'an on the bullet train.  Cindy stayed in Beijing, but Sarah came with us on the train, and when we arrived at the station we met our new guide, Tony.  So we will have Tony and Sarah for the next several days.  Sarah will be with our family for the rest of our trip because she will go with us to TongJie's province for the last couple of days.  This is our third time having Sarah for a guide - she was with us when we got TongJie in 2012 and again for Ezekiel in 2015 and we really like her!  

We all had dinner together before heading to our hotel.  Everyone was really hungry and the food was good and a lot of it was very spicy.  Ezekiel fell asleep during dinner and slept through the 30 minute bus ride to our hotel and all the way till we got up to our room around 9:00.  We had him go to the bathroom and then laid him on the bed and he went right back to sleep.  TongJie was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow as well.  It was a long day!  Jeff said that the sight seeing this morning has been his favorite so far, but I liked the Great Wall yesterday better.  Tomorrow we get to see the Terracotta Warriors and I'm really looking forward to that.  It's cooler in Xian and it was rainy this evening.  The cooler weather was very nice after being so hot in Beijing.

More photos of The Great Wall (Tuesday, June 25)

A few more photos of the Great Wall . . . 

Fw: Tuesday, June 25 - The Great Wall!!

I posted this yesterday, but my parents said it wasn't showing up on our blog, so I'm trying to re-post it, this time without as many pictures and hopefully that will work.  If the other post ever shows up, there will be two identical posts of the Great Wall except this one will have only one photo.

We woke up early again this morning and ate breakfast and went for a walk near our hotel before meeting our group at 8:30 and heading to The Great Wall.  TongJie and Ezekiel have been excited for months about seeing the Great Wall of China.  It was about an hour and a half bus ride - Beijing is a huge city, so it takes a long time just to get out of the city, and the Great Wall is in the mountains so it's outside of the city.  The section of the wall that we went to, surprisingly, was not very busy at all, so that was really nice.  It was very hot again today, and going on the Wall requires a lot of steep climbing, so we weren't sure how far we'd get.  The steps are quite steep, and also the heights of the steps are uneven - some are low, shallow steps, and some are tall (and hard for short little legs!) but the boys did a great job climbing up many, many steps and we stopped at a few different fortresses along the way and saw some amazing views.  When it was time to go back down, we had not fully anticipated the difficulty Ezekiel was going to have but we quickly realized he was going to need a lot of help because of his lack of depth perception.  Although going up was okay for him because he could see the front of the steps as we were approaching them, he was almost paralyzed with caution as we started down the steps, even holding onto my hand.  We figured out a way to make it work though.  On the way up, he had sort of invented a number system for the steps to categorize them based on height: "1" was the lowest steps, "2" was medium (like a regular stair step that we are used to), and "3" was the high steps, plus there were even a few "4" level steps that were giant steps even for an adult.  So, going down, we simply used his number system and I told him what each step was before he stepped down.  It worked pretty well and we made it with lots of time to spare before the 12:30 meeting time - even enough time to get popsicles at the gift shop next to the parking lot!

Next we went to a jade factory and then had lunch.  On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at the site of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, which will also house the 2022 Winter Olympics.  We could have done without stopping at the Olympic Stadium - we didn't go in or anything, but just walked around outside in the gigantic parking lot with almost no shade so people could take pictures, but it was so hot and we were already tired!  By the time we got back to our hotel, it was 5:00 and the boys were worn out.  There was an optional actobat show that TongJie and Jeff had planned on going to, but it started at 5:30 so the people who were going didn't even get off the bus at the hotel - they just went directly to the show.  Because we were all so tired, TongJie decided that he didn't want to go to the show after all, so we all just went back to our hotel room which I think ended up being a good choice.  I wish they would have gotten to see it, but I'm glad that TongJie was able to get to bed at a decent time and not overdo it wearing himself out.  The Great Wall was most definitely the highlight of today and I'm glad we got to go there early in the day and that it was not crowded at all - we got lots of great pictures!  We remembered to take our tablet today, so we got some pictures on the tablet so they're easy to put on our blog.

Monday, June 24

Monday, June 24

Not only was today our first full day in China, but it is also Ezekiel's "Family Day" - he joined our family on this day in 2015, exactly 4 years ago.  How fun that we happen to be in China to celebrate this special day!  

Our flight arrived in Beijing around 4:00 pm yesterday.  Another family in our group was on the same flight but we didn't realize it until after we went through customs and baggage claim and met up with our guide.  We got to our hotel after 6:00, got settled and we were all asleep by 8:00.  We were up early this morning but we had all slept pretty well through the night.  The boys were so excited about the breakfast buffet at our hotel!  They loved having noodles and spring rolls (and bacon!) for breakfast.  We had time to walk around some of the streets near our hotel and scope things out before meeting up with our group at 8:30.  There were six families today, but a seventh family will be joining our group tomorrow.  So far, all of the other kids are teenage girls, except for one older brother in college, so our boys are the youngest by far, but the older kids are all really nice and TongJie and Ezekiel have been having fun hanging out with them.  We went to the Temple of Heaven this morning - it was a LOT of walking in the hot sun and I thought it might be a little boring for the boys, but at the end of today, TongJie said that the Temple of Heaven was his favorite thing we did today.  Ezekiel did really well even though it was hot and bright.  We brought umbrellas, so having an umbrella helped, and part of the time we got to be in the shade.  It is actually a very large park, so the temple buildings (built for "the god of heaven" in ancient times) are only part of what we saw, and we also got to spend some time in the shady park area with juniper and cypress trees, most of which are very old.  We spent around 2 and a half hours at the Temple of Heaven, and then went to a silk factory and learned how silk is made, which was pretty interesting.  China is famous for its silk so it was fun to learn about how they make it and see some of the machines and stuff, and we also bought some things there.  Then we had lunch, which was served family style with a bunch of different dishes in the middle of the table for everyone to try.  Our guide, Cindy, whom we've had as a guide both times we were in China before, had the adults sit at a table together, and the kids sit at another table together.  Jeff and I were a little worried about how TongJie and Ezekiel would do sitting with the teenage girls (mostly worried that our boys would be annoying) but all the girls have been really nice and helpful to them, and TongJie and Ezekiel really liked feeling like part of the group.  TongJie told me that he was talking to one of the girls about golf, ha ha!  He'll talk to anybody about golf if they'll listen, but apparently this girl has played golf so she actually was a willing participant in the conversation.

After lunch, we went to an old traditional part of the city and took a tour on rickshaws.  The streets are so narrow in some places that there aren't many cars, but a lot of bicycles, mopeds, and rickshaws.  The area that we saw was kind of a touristy area so there were rickshaws specifically for taking people around on tours, but there are still many hutong areas of Beijing where people live that aren't touristy.  The ricksaw ride was fun.  Two people that could go on each rickshaw, so Ezekiel and I went together, and TongJie and Jeff went together.  Later, Ezekiel said that the rickshaw ride was his favorite part of today.

We got back to our hotel at 4:30, so it was a long day of being tourists, especially for an 8 year old and a 5 year old, but we're looking forward to the Great Wall tomorrow!  We celebrated Ezekiel's family day by going to Dairy Queen and walking around some of the streets near our hotel.  We're all pretty tired and the boys both fell asleep as soon as we had them take showers and got their teeth brused and into bed.

We've been taking lots of pictures, but right now I don't have a way to get them off of the cameras, so I'll just have to attach some pictures that we've taken with our tablet.  One is of the boys standing on the balcony of our hotel room, and the others are just pictures of them in our hotel.  China blocks a lot of websites, and one of them is Blogger, so in order to post to our blog, we have to send the post as an email.  It worked the two other times we were in China, so hopefully it will work this time as well!  We'll try to post some more exciting pictures in the days to come.

A Visit to China!

Hi everyone!  Once again, it's been a long time since we've been on the ol' blog!  My last update was around Christmastime of 2017.  Since then, TongJie has had his bone graft surgery (March 2018), where bone from his hip was grafted into the gap in his gumline, and he recently got braces on his top teeth late this winter.  He just finished 2nd grade, which is hard to believe!  He loves writing and math and is really getting quite impressive at math in particular.  He finished out the school year studying animals at school and he chose the bald eagle to focus on for his end of the year project.  I couldn't resist making him a bald eagle tie to wear for his presentation.

Equally hard to believe, Ezekiel just finished pre-kindergarten and will be starting kindergarten in the fall!  Ezekiel loves school and can't wait to be a kindergartner.  He is still working on being a dual-media reader: reading in both braille and print.  He is an amazing reader for his age, especially considering his visual impairment.  He can read large print quite well, and is slowly improving at reading braille.  I also took an online braille class over the winter and I'm trying to learn it along with him so I'll be able to keep up with what he's doing.  He is using a CCTV (a very large-screened video magnifier) at home over the summer and loves to use it for reading books in print. 

TongJie likes to read to Ezekiel, which is always sweet to see, and Ezekiel loves being read to.

Jeff and I just finished out our school years of teaching as well.  Our family's big news right now is that we're going to China!  We are going to be participating in a "Heritage Tour," which is a guided tour specifically for families with children who are adopted from China.  We will be traveling with a group of other families and we're looking forward to seeing the Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, Terracotta Warriors, and the Dujiangyan Panda Base among lots of other things.  We will be ending our trip by visiting the Zhejiang Province, where TongJie is from, and spending time in the city he is from (Wenzhou City), visiting his orphanage, and spending our last day in Hangzhou, which is the capital city of the province.  Our plan is to return again to China in a few years to spend some time in Ezekiel's province and hopefully visit his orphanage as well.  It would have been too long of a trip to try to do everything this time around, and we think Ezekiel will be able to get more out of a visit to his province when he's a little older.

I'm writing up this quick blog post late at night on the eve of our big trip so that's all for now.  We leave tomorrow and will arrive in Beijing on Sunday afternoon China time.  I plan to update our blog as much as possible during our trip so anyone who wants to follow along can see what we're up to.  That's all for now, and next time I post something we should be in Beijing!