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.
No comments:
Post a Comment