Jim's Birthday

People have been wondering about our schedule of events while we are here in China. We are headed to Zhengzhou City in Henan Province tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. We will make a run to the local supermarket to purchase items for the week ahead. On Monday we will get to meet Sean for the first time. It is unclear how, when or where, but we know it is Monday. We will spend the remainder of the week in Zhengzhou finalizing the adoption on the Chinese end, and filling out necessary paperwork for immigration back to the U.S. At the end of the week we will head to Guangzhou City in Guangdong Province for immigration appointments at the Consulate. All of the paperwork should be complete on the 24th and we will return to Helena on the 25th.

We spent our last day in Beijing visiting a few more sites that we missed back in 2005. First thing in the morning we headed to the Yonghegong Tibetan Buddhist Lama Temple. The temple was built in 1694 and contains an 18 meter tall Buddha carved out of a single piece of white sandalwood. It was absolutely gorgeous. We have included a few pictures from the Temple grounds.








After the temple, we took a stroll through the Hutong’s in the adjacent neighborhood. It was fairly chilly, so we stopped for a cup of coffee and chatted it up with the local shop owner.





Jim’s birthday lunch followed. We settled on a restaurant that looked clean enough that we wouldn’t spend the rest of our trip ill, but local enough to serve up some good dishes. After a few questions of “do you have . . .” (remember we are illiterate in Chinese), we settled on one of Jim’s favorite dishes Hui Guo Rou (twice cooked pork or as we like to call it twice cooked fat), Yuxiang Qiezi (eggplant in fish sauce) and Chinese tea.




Since we ate so much at lunch, we did not partake in any of the tasty street snacks we encountered on our afternoon walk.









We ended our day with a Chinese acrobatic show. Unfortunately, due to safety reasons, we don’t have any pictures to share with you. Just imagine 5 motorcycles driving around inside a big, round metal cage or five women all balancing on a pole, holding on with nothing but their mouths. Wow!

Only two more wake-ups until we meet Sean Yin!