We Have Arrived!

We arrived safely and on time to Beijing yesterday afternoon. It is now 3:10 a.m. in Beijing and Donna (my niece who is traveling with us) and I can not sleep. We stayed up for 27 hours straight to try to get on China time, but now we are wide awake. Joe and Katrina are still sleeping, so that is good for them.

We decided to venture out on our own yesterday, despite how clearly nervous it made our tour guides. Of course it was perfectly safe, we made it back without any trouble, and we had a great time. We went to Chaoyang park, which was the venue for the Olympic tennis and beach volleyball games. The park was great! It was huge and so pretty. The picture to the right shows us at the entrance to the park. As you can see, Katrina is wiped out from the trip. She never woke up again after this (and she's still asleep now). The park had a Sony exploration museum, rides, games, an exercise park, several Olympic venues, public art works, an amazing dog park, and lots of tennis courts, basketball courts and public green spaces.

The Paralympic Games are starting today, September 6th (it's September 5th for all of you). They take place a few weeks after every Olympics at the same Olympic venues. Several of the athletes were on our flight. Because of this, there is still a lot of Olympic fever here in Beijing. There are still lots of helpful information booths all around the city as well. This is handy for us, because all the workers at the information booths speak a little English. While I had big plans to learn Mandarin before this trip, the plans were not realized. I am embarrassed to say what I do know, because I know I sound silly when I say it.

While at Chaoyang Park, we came across a very large ladybug. We thought is was so cute from a distance. As we got closer we realized it was a bathroom. Because it was so cute (see the picture), and because we had been drinking lots of bottled water, we couldn't resist using the facilities. Now, in making this decision, we all concluded that this would be a great place to go because it was at an Olympic venue, so they had to have western style toilets, right? Wrong! All they had were the squatty potties. Plus, this was not a new facility built as part of the sprucing up of Beijing. As soon as we got to the entryway, we could smell the "history" of the ladybug. The smell alone was not enough to turn us away (usually it is, but we were trying to be open minded), but the absence of western toilets was too much to handle. After all, we'd been awake for 24+ hours at this point and I was afraid squatting that low on my overly tired legs was a risk I was not willing to take. The last thing I wanted on my first day in China was to have to be extracted from a very smelly hole in the ground.