The Forbidden City

North entrance to Forbidden City

Lila in front of the empress' lion

Ahhh to be emperor!!!!

Stone carving...this weighs 200 tons

Lila and Emily our tour guide

Peace from the Forbidden City

Adopting families group photo

Three emperor wannabes crossing

the emperor's bridge

(Jack on the left is the guy who ate the silk worm)

South entrance to the Forbidden City

Tian'anmen Square

(Mao's mausoleum in the background)

Machine that unravels the silk cocoons

Stretching silk fabric to make a comforter

Beijing Hard Rock

Hard Rock's version of a stone carving

Rock On!!!

Okay, it is 9:30am on Monday and we are expecting to be united with Aubree for the first time at 2:30pm, so I am going to work hard and catch up the blog in the next few hours.

Our last day full day in Beijing was this past Saturday and we were very busy. It began with our adoption orientation and there were a couple of new families added to our group that had just arrived. The orientation was led by Les who heads up the Holt office in Beijing, he walked up through a lot of information and explained many things we would experience. Les and his wife are from Great Britain but have lived in China for the past 20 years, so he is very knowledgeable. At the end of his presentation he had one more slide and one by one an updated photo of our children began to pop up on the screen. This the first time we had seen a very current photo of Aubree as it was taken about a week earlier. He explained to the group that there was only one child who seem to be very upset about having her picture taken as she was crying in all of them, yep and that one child was our Aubree. Next they handed out an album that contained many more current photos and it also had lots of personal information about Aubree. We then all moved to another room for a wonderful Chinese lunch served family style once again. This was the best Chinese food we had experienced so far and everyone got their fill and spent time getting acquainted. Most of the group were actually adopting boys and only one other couple was adopting a little girl. Some children were as old as 5 and a couple of families were back for their second child.

After lunch we headed off for our tour of the Forbidden City. This place was built between 1406 and 1420, during the reign of the Ming emperor Yongle. Its construction was an incredible undertaking, involving one million laborers, 100,000 craftsman, and vast quantities of materials. On completion it was the largest palace complex in the world, covering a total area of 856,800 sq. yards. It was called the Forbidden City because only the emperor, his family, the staff and officials were allowed within the walls. Only the emperor and his family ever left the city and really only to visit the Temple of Heaven or to go and stay at the Summer Palace. Many of the staff and concubines never went outside the walls of the FC during the entire life. There is a moat around the entire city and the earth removed for the moat created a man made hill to the north of the FC (I will try to point it out in one of the pictures in the background). This hill is amazing considering all that earth was moved with shovels and wheel barrels. There was a special stone path which ran down the axis of the city from north to south. The emperor was the only person allowed to walk on this path. Some of the stone carvings that are on the path leading up steps were never walked on by the emperor but when we would come to these points on the path he would be carried over the carvings in a special chair so he could remain on the path. Myself and the other dads in the group enjoyed having our picture taken in many locations in the city while standing on the emperor's path (I am not sure but I may have been an emperor in a previous life...Lila disagrees).

We exited the city on the south end, which is right across the street from Tian'anmen Square. It was interesting to be standing in this place, but many of us had difficulty marveling in it because it definitely had a purpose of glorifying the communist party and the original chairman Mao Zedong's. I could not help but think about the massacre that had taken place here. So we did not stay long and made our way across the square passing Mao's mausoleum where his body still rests inside a crystal coffin.

The last stop of the tour was the Yuan Hou Silk Mall where we were shown how silk is harvested, turned to thread and woven into fabric. I guess I never really took the time to think much about where silk came from but I learned the whole process. It basically begins with two moths that lay eggs, that then become caterpillars, which then spin cocoons made of silk. These cocoons are then taken to a special machine that unravels the cocoon into one thread thousands of meters long. A single silk thread is very weak so they spin several threads together to make a very strong single thread. It is this thread that is used to make fabric. The highlight of this tour was when the lady giving the tour showed us what a cocoon with all the silk removed looked liked and she tore it open to show the larvae inside. She explained it was used to make cosmetics and could be eaten as it was very good for your skin. She offered it to one of the dads to eat not really expecting him to take her up on it, but to the amazement of the group he popped the little silk worm in his mouth and chewed it right before our eyes. We all had great fun teasing him the remainder of the day saying his skin had such a nice sheen to it.

We returned to the hotel know we needed to back for our 6am departure to the airport the next morning but could not refuse the invitation by one of the couple's to join them for dinner at the Beijing Hard Rock. I had a cheeseburger and fries that made me miss home a little as it was the first food of our trip that was actually what you can get back home. They even put ice in my coke. We enjoyed getting to know this couple a little more and were excited for them as they were adopting a son and this was their first child. They had two domestic adoptions previously fall through, so their story made our 4 year wait seem rather painless in comparison. The drive across the city at night was pretty special as well because of the way the Chinese light up their buildings and the architecture was amazing. We returned to the hotel and packed up so we would be ready for our flight to Guiyang the next morning.