themoodyblogger

Hello All,

And I thought yesterday was tiring.

Today we met the other families that will be adopting children along with us.  I believe it is about 12 families.  We began the day at breakfast where D met another friend.  Together he and his new friend found instead of snails yesterday, it was earthworms today.  Now imagine three Moody children running around with any critter they can find.  Scary, no?

After breakfast we met our guides George and Cindy.  They gave us a little history of Beijing on our way to our first stop at older park of the city known as a hutong.  FYI – hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan, or traditional courtyard residences.  Many neighbourhoods were formed by joining one siheyuan to another to form a hutong, and then joining one hutong to another. The word hutong is also used to refer to such neighbourhoods.  Oh did I mention that got to this area by rickshaw carriage.  If you don’t recall what those are, there was a Seinfield episode with Kramer about it.  We were explained how the homes in this area have been handed down from generation to generation and have a history dating back to the Zhou dynasty.  We were introduced to a retired physics teacher who told us all about her home and its history.  Once informed that Bill’s mom was also a retired teacher, the nice lady informed us that on our next visit I must bring my mom so they can “talk shop.”  From there we rode back by rickshaw to the bus and proceeded to the silk factory.  There we found out about how the silk is prepared from the cocoons and fashioned into a thread to make cloth.  Very interesting.  Oh did I mention worms, silk worms that is.  Of course D wanted to hold some of them and the lady at the factory allowed him to do just that.  He was in heaven.

Lunch was at a local restaurant on a big lazy susan  full of goodies.  After lunch we walked from the restaurant to Tiananmen Square.  As you can see by the photos, the national holiday still is going on to some extent.  Lots a people around the square.  We saw their version of the Capital, the National Museum, and many of the other building surrounding the square.

Next we walked through the Forbidden City in all its historical glory.  It was amazing of the scope and size of it all.  It’s hard to imagine all the work that was involved in building it.

It was a lot of walking that left all but one in the Moody Family wanting to go to sleep as soon as the hotel appeared around the corner.  Well someone had to tell everyone how the day went.  As the day was ending, we tried to wake the D-man for dinner to no avail.  Realizing it was futile, Lori decide to go back to sleep leaving Bill to seek dinner on his own.  Let see, Bill on his own in Beijing …hmmm