One Hour In Beijing

We slept well, but even after 23 hours of travel, just can’t make ourselves sleep past 5:00 am. . . Our bodies think it’s 1:00 in the afternoon.

The trip was long and cramped, but I guess as pleasant as anyone could have asked for. All of the attendants were nice, and they just kept serving stuff. Reminded me of being in a hospital; all you really want to do is sleep in a very uncomfortable place, but someone keeps asking if you need anything (Michael). The way the local times worked out, we were served dinner 3 times! It was not the biggest of planes, but certainly the biggest we’ve been on – 8 seats across. Before we were even seated, stacked in like crayons in the 64 crayola box, we both concluded that we had definitely, positively made the right decision in buying Ari her own seat for the return trip.

We were late, as mentioned, leaving Seattle, and thus late leaving Tokyo. We landed about 20 minutes after our connecting flight should have departed. It was a mad dash through the airport praying our plane was still there. (It was, much to the dismay of the people already seated, waiting for us.) We had no time to even check out an airport shop in Japan. The one thing that was remarkable was – there were people everywhere waiting to look at your ticket and direct you. They were even polite and helpful. Even security was polite, organized, and fast. It was not an American airport!

We have only spent an hour awake in Beijing so far, and most of it has been laughing. Our guide is a large Chinese man – dwarfs Michael – who speaks non-stop rapid-fire English. His English is excellent, but enough accent and prosody differences that I really have to concentrate to keep up. (I think he asked us if we want to eat donkey tonight. He definitely determined that we agreed that we wanted to drink “local white lightening” today. No snakes in the bottle, PLEASE, as I have seen in pictures.) The driver did not speak English but obviously spent many hours playing Mario Kart to get his drivers license. I guess we were too tired to be terrified as he whipped up the highway at twice the speed as any other drivers, weaving in and out of impossibly small spaces. I didn’t even have the energy to be frightened when he straddled the dotted lines and squeezed between parallel cars in the lanes. Or maybe I wasn’t scared because at high speed, it was over so fast.

The funniest thing was the guide asking about adoption, when we told him we had 4 sons. I think I get comments in the US when I buy yogurt 40 at a time. . . This was hilarious. He went on and on in incredulity. Then, after a moment of quiet, he burst out in Chinese, and we could see him and the driver talking excitedly, holding up 4 fingers and pointing at us.

He said it will be very exciting for us to be here to watch the celebration for the new year. He said it is a very family-oriented holiday, and parents always give gifts to their children, like Christmas in the US. We have the best gift for our daughter, he said. “American parents. The best gift.” Michael said, “It is a gift for us, too.”