Beijing - Day 9, June 29th - Sightseeing

Another early morning, but the difference was that this was an organized tour so we began to meet other American families that are adopting (one family was from Minnesota, two from Texas, and another family from Arizona who did not go on the tour). Our first stop was the famous Beijing Zoo, to see their six pandas. The stop at the zoo was just to see the pandas and we did not get a chance to visit any other part of the zoo although they do have other animals. The panda exhibits were very nice with good indoor and outdoor enclosures. There was a TV film crew from NBC doing some pre-Olympic coverage filming the pandas. They ended up interviewing Melanie, myself and another person from our group so perhaps we'll be on TV later this summer. The man doing the interviewing is also in the process of adopting from China and so he was very excited that our group are all couples in China adopting. We reassured him that the wait does finally end!

We then drove to the Summer Palace, all along seeing more of the city. Beijing is ringed with six "beltways", either highways or major roads. It is nearly impossible to describe the scale of the Summer Palace, the largest imperial garden in the world at 725 acres. Originally built in 1750, it is mainly made up of the Longevity Hill and the Kunming Lake. The Palace has the longest corridor in the world, which we walked. The corridor, which is open to the outside on each side, has 8,000 individual paintings depicting scenes and people from Chinese history on the beams that make up the ceiling. We took a dragon boat across the lake which was fun. We then drove to a famous restaurant in Beijing, which is over 500 years old. We had a wonderful meal of Peking Duck, along with other Chinese food. Our next stop was a pearl factory before going onto the Temple of Heaven - the wallet is getting thinner.

The Temple of Heaven was also amazing, but again difficult to describe. Originally built in 1420 during the Ming dynasty. This was used by the Emperors twice a year. The whole area is enclosed with a long wall. The actual Temple of Heaven has lots of blue, including the roof to symbolize heaven. We descended along a bridge that symbolizes where the earth meets heaven.

We were pleased to have a knock on our hotel door at night and met our Great Wall adoption guide, Kathy. She sat with us to describe what was to transpire over the next two days. We have some anxiety since the medical report on Indigo is over six months old. We know the families adopting from the other province, Anhui will be given in writing all updated information regarding feeding schedules, sleeping schedules and any start in toilet trainings (Chinese potty train their children very young). Kathy is really awesome and said that we should write down our questions and that she would try to get answers for us. Melanie is also getting sick with a cold, sore throat etc. and she asked Kathy about some medicine for a sore throat and later Kathy showed up with something to mix in water to drink for the throat.