Peking Duck

Meeting a Chinese boy at Tianenmen Square.

That is the understatement of the vacation! Chinese can only have one child, so for them our TWO white boys were like rock stars. It just can't be explained as well as it can be witnessed. They get a lot of attention in Korea, but there are a couple Westerners running around Seoul --- in China there are fewer Westerners, so the attention was exacerbated. At one point, the crowd had to be shoo'd away from a security guy. What a crazy (and actually annoying at a certain point) situation!

This time we replaced the Chinese lady and her son with Jim's parents. Phew, better!
And, there you go - the quintessential pic of Mao that you've seen a million times on TV.
Here we are in Temple of Heaven, akin to Central Park in Manhattan, except it used to be closed to the public and was simply the residense of royalty. It was a cool place because we went early in the morning and watched thousands of Chinese doing Tai Chi, which is anything from what we think it is in the states to the jitterbug to country line-dancing. Honestly! It's just dancing to whatever music you want, or no music at all, or spontaneous yoga - it is hard to describe, but very cool that folks of almost all ages go to the parks and dance/exercise together in the mornings.
Ah, there it is --- "When in Rome..." Raye takes her shot at some Tai Chi meets line-dancing with some Chinese ladies; she did it for quite some time and was assisted in a very friendly manner by the ladies closest to her there. She caught on like a local!
More to come.........

They know about the fork

Hey! He just got back from China. Never thought I'd say that! I am reminded of a Seinfeld bit where he is talking about chopsticks. He says "They know about the fork ... the Chinese farmer in the field, he's not standing there working the soil with a poker, but with a pitch fork... like a dining fork ... they KNOW about the fork." It loses something when it's written in a lame blog. Ho hum, it's funny, really!

We went to Beijing and the nearby portion of the Great Wall from 3-8 May with our 15 month old twins and their paternal grandparents. Here are some pix, the weather could not have been better - it was, however, China's "Labor Week" - like we have Labor Day, they get a week off - which means EVERYONE was out seeing the tourist sites with us. 1.5 billion Chinese competing with us at The Wall, Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven - not to mention the many shops of knock off Polo, Coach, Kate Spade, Gap, Abercrombie, Spyder, North Face, Nike ... I could go on forever.

Finally, here is that accurately named "Great Wall" --- we walked up it for almost an hour and a half, which I think covered 3.5 miles uphill, on stairs, with our 25 pound precious bundles on our backs, so they did it, too, and so did Grandma and Grandpa!!!

In the following pic, you can see Jim and Jimmy in the center if you look intently - they headed down in a hurry when Jimmy started to fall asleep on Jim's back. The backpacks are great, but not the best way to catch a nap!
When we got back into our guide's van, it didn't take very long for both the boys to zonk out. Grandma bought them the smallest "I Climbed the Great Wall" tee shirts the venders had, so we draped them in them for the photo op, but didn't get the words "I climbed the Great Wall" in the pic due to limited space in the van... still awesome pic, they were so tuckered out! Needless to say, the adults were rather smoked also!
I will post more of China and the rest of the Grandparents' trip to Korea soon!