Saturday our first day in Beijing sightseeing

Since Todd and I have been to Beijing we asked our adoption agency coordinator if our guide could show some new things as well as repeat some of the best of last time. Just before picking us up from the airport Yoshi picked up Ann and Brian, another couple from our agency that will be with us in Beijing and Guangzhou (so they are the other couple in all our pictures). Our day started with a rickshaw tour of the old neighborhoods called “The Hutongs”. We stopped at one door and they gave us a “local home tour” so we could see a typical home. It is built in the shape of a square donut with a courtyard in the center and rooms all around it. The room on the north that receives the northern sun is for the most important person in the family being the grandparents. The room on the south would be for the servants, the room on the east receiving the eastern sun would be the second warmest so the son would stay in that room and if they had a second child or a daughter shoe would stay in the western room.

From there we walked to the Forbidden City and rather than going from the front all the way thru to the back, it does have 9,999 and 1/2 rooms, we went in a side entrance and saw the first several courtyards and then headed to Tiananmen Square. Then it was off to a Hot Pots lunch. There is a center cauldron with coal burning under it and a stove pipe coming out the center and the bowl is divided into two sections with two soup bases, one vegetable and one spicy to cook your food. We had mutton, several green leafy items, lotus root which looked like round Swiss cheese, noodles, and bean sprouts with several sauces and sorbet to finish off the meal – FABULOUS and SO FUN!



After lunch we went to the Ancient Observatory, an astronomy museum built in 1442 which is the oldest one with astronomical instruments in the world. On the rooftop and in the gardens there were large cast bronze astronomical instruments created to determine declination, solar time, altitude and zenith distances, azimuth of celestial bodies, distance between stars, etc. It was very interesting for a family of astronomy lovers. Both Ming and Yoshi couldn’t believe this was something we would be interested in seeing and Ming asked earlier “So is this a family hobby?” If she could only guess!


Temple of Heaven Park was next and a repeat that we were hoping for, as it was a favorite from our last trip. We really enjoyed watching the local people enjoy life, cards, mahjong, their version of hacky-sack with several brightly colored feathers tied to some weights like washers, and the musical instruments and singing was as last time FACINATING! A local musician even invited Dad to try an Er Hu and he was a good sport to give it a try, we even figured out he was playing “Mary had a Little Lamb” so he could have a future in Asian musical instruments. The other bowing instrument is a Suo Na.






Our day ended with the Pearl Factory where I was able to add a set of black pearls to my pink pearls from the last trip, one to pass on to each daughter. At that point we all crashed! Tomorrow we get to see a different section of the Great Wall than we saw last time.