Hey, Anyone Remember Blue Sky?

Hello from Beijing!

What an adventure China has been thus far.

We’re off early in the AM tomorrow, but we wanted to share these with you. In all honesty, I am shocked that I was finally able to get online and post this- for three days I’ve been blocked. Google is blocked. Facebook is blocked. Gmail is normally blocked. Instagram is sometimes blocked. It’s crazy.

When we landed here, I had a hard time making out where the ground was. It looked like there was a huge forest fire as the air had a thick brown quality to it. When we landed, it didn’t clear up, and still hasn’t. It’s quite shocking to be somewhere that is so dirty. Josh and I keep saying that it feels like our eyes aren’t focusing properly because we can’t see beyond the next building. There are over 1000+ new cars hitting the roads here in Beijing every day. The sun is orange and there are no stars. There is no blue sky.

With that said, our first three days in China have been great. We’ve really seen a lot and we’ve had an amazing guide, Sophie, who has been so good to us! It’s been a godsend to have transportation and explanations of where we are and what we are seeing. On Day 1- we went and visited the Forbidden City, where we walked the kilometer long Imperial grounds from the South to the North gates. Luna loved seeing where the Empress lived. We haven’t seen any other western children since we’ve been in China, and throughout the day, people will come up to Luna and take pictures with her, try to pick her up and hold her and she’s quickly tired of this. We’ve had to try to make excuses for her, to explain (in Mandarin) that she’s shy so that they leave her alone, even though she’s not shy at all.

Here have been some of our highlights: We had a wonderful tea tasting ceremony where we were able to try freshly grown Chinese tea of all varieties and it was amazing! We went to a kite maker’s shop and made a kite with him. We used rice paper and bamboo and Luna drew the design; we’re planning on flying it on the river cruise in the next few days. We went to a silk market today and saw the entire process of breeding silkworms- the eggs, to worm to silk! It was really incredible and we were able to spread cocoons out and help make silk blankets. We were even offered the treat of tasty and nutritious silkworms to munch on as a snack, but we passed.

We visited the traditional hutong neighborhoods via rickshaw, visited Tiananmen square after going through security checks and having our passports checked, visited the Temple of Heaven and had a tai chi lesson, and even saw the Great Wall of China!

The Great Wall is amazing and it was so lovely to be there with Josh and Luna. We drove over 2 hours to get to a portion of the wall that was not covered in tourists, and it was so worth it. When we arrived, we saw another 20 people, at most. It felt like we had wall to ourselves much of the time and it was quite peaceful. Luna kept exclaiming things like, “Wow, Mama, it really is long!” and “It keeps going forever!” Her favorite part of the wall were the little alcoves in the watchtowers that she used as little areas to sing. The grandeur of the wall impressive. When it was originally built, it was over 10,000 kilometers long!

More observations and adventures soon!

xo