The Forbidden City & Temple of Heaven

Saturday was another good day for us and we visited the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. The Forbidden City was amazing with the size and the details in the buildings. The Forbidden City is located at Tiananmen Square. It is very cold in Beijing in the winter but there were thousands of people out and about. THe Forbidden City was built in 1406-1420 by one million laborers. The emperor lived there until 1924.

We then visited the Temple of Heaven which is a majestic imperial temple and park where empoerors offered sacrifices. Basically it is a huge park whith people hanging out dancing, playing games, singing, and praying.

We did some shopping and that was an adventure. The sales people attack you with products and wanting to buy from them. It is several stories high and is almost like a flea-market with each booth having an aggressive sales person. We bought one item that started out at 480 rmb (approx $80.00) and we bought it for 60 rmb (approx $10.00). Never pay retail!

We left for Kunming about 6:00pm and we were both exhausted from lack of sleep. It was a miserable 3.5 hour flight and we both struggled. Once at the room we made a few calls home and went to sleep. This morning we are going to try and go to a Christian church we found on the internet.

One story we have to share. When we arrived in Kunming the airplane parked out on the tarmac and two buses were there waiting to take us to the terminal. Both buses were packed with people (standing room only). Just before our bus took off a Chinese man jumped off and ran just off the tarmac and went behind a small sign. It loked like he was releiving himself. The bus pulled away and then cirlced the plane to pull back around by the sign the man was using. Well, the man was not relieving himself like you would think. He was squating and going #2 right there for the entire bus to watch. The bus waited, and no one on the bus other than Melissa and I seemd bothered by this. He stood up and came right back onto the bus, grabbed a handle rail, and we went to the terminal. Unbelievable!

Please excuse any typing mistakes we make on the blog. There is no spell check and the screen is very small and hard to see. In China you cannot access blogs. So we have to go to anotehr site and then link into our home computer to post. When we do this the screen is very small.

Tomorrow morning at 8:10am we leave to go get Owen. Today we are going to WalMart to get some things we will need for him. We are excited to see him for the first time. As most of you know we received very little information about him so we are anxious to hold him and know more. It is hard to think tomorrow morning we will have 4 kids!

Melissa and I talked yesterday about the life Iris would have had if she had not been adopted. How would she have survived on here own? It is sad to think how many orphans there are in the world and how many of them will never get the chance to live a decent life.