Aug. 3

I'll try my best to make this readable. I will not be able to do any formatting or editing today. The reason is that all of the words in Blogger are written in Chinese. I am unable to get the Internet to work from our room. It should be a simple thing -- but then again, our Ethernet line was declared "dead" in our hotel room in San Francisco which is the most technological city in the world! Thank goodness for hotel business centers!

Long story short, Peter did get his suitcase back. (And when I say "his" suitcase, I mean one checked in under his name. Half of the stuff in it is donations for the orphanage, 25% is his stuff and 25% is my stuff.) There was a lot of miscommunication between the airline and the baggage service because the delivery driver thought he was looking for a house rather than a hotel. But we did get the bag back in time for our flight to Beijing.

The plane ride was excellent. We were pleasantly surprised that we were seated in "economy plus." This meant that we had an extra 5 inches of legroom. What a difference! When I purchased the tickets on Travelocity, it said there were no tickets available at $617 (one way), but for $717 they could get us seats. I agreed to the higher price. Looking back I realize that there must have been one coach seat left and that the extra $100 per person was for the upgrade. It was worth it! Plus they remembered our vegetarian meals (which were tasty). We also ate some sourdough bread that they sold at the airport. Delicious! The man sitting in aisle our row got up a lot, so we were able to get out fairly easily as well.

Our guide, Angela, met us at the airport. Angela is a name she uses to make it easier for Westerners. Thus we have taken on Chinese names to make it easier for Angela. I go by Jun Su Yang (as in Jun Rui and Jun Hua Yang), and my husband is Peter Li.

I wish I could remember more Chinese phrases. Instead I keep wanting to speak Spanish. Sometimes I go ahead with the Spanish when I know that the other person isn't going to understand me anyway. It is like a secret language that my husband and I can use here. Having spent five weeks in Spanish-speaking countries in the last year, it is a difficult impulse to control. I still think of us as "Pedro y Susana."

Angela is going to give us a wake up call at 6:30 a.m. local time tomorrow. We are going to the Great Wall and to an acrobatics show. It will just be the four of us -- Angela, our van driver, Peter and me. There is another couple from our adoption agency at this hotel, but I think they went to the Great Wall today. Perhaps we will meet them at breakfast?

We walked around our hotel and it is by far the fanciest Days Inn I've ever seen. There is an indoor pool, hair salon, several restaurants, a gym and indoor golf (putting only). We saw some turtles in a tank and got excited until we realized that diners are to choose the one they want for dinner!

We are very close to a hypermarket where we bought some water and milk. (The "best" milk available was expired by one day.) One thing I noticed is that although there were a lot of foods packaged for convenience, most of the foods didn't have any "brand" associated with them. We made dinner in the room (in an attempt to decrease the amount of luggage we have since there will be a lower baggage allowance on our next flight) and now Peter is asleep. He didn't even take a nap on the 14-hour plane ride.

By the way, this is my first trip to China. Peter went to Hong Kong, Macau and a bit of the southern mainland in 1985. However, this was his first transpacific flight because previously he flew East (from London) whereas I've previously crossed the Pacific to travel to Hawaii, Japan and Australia.

In case you are wondering why there are no photos, it is because so far there hasn't been anything entertaining to showcase. Jet lag isn't pretty. Also, Peter is just learning to use his new digital camera. I have my camera too (the one I left in Paris on our honeymoon and returned to get it back a week later), but we don't have the right software. Plus we will need to use MY computer rather than a public computer for the downloads. So I apologize for the big block of text. It's like they say: "Journalism is the rough draft of history."