The Unlikely Tour Group

Wow, so it's been more than a month now since I've posted. Life got the better of me and I have had trouble finding the quiet time and mental energy necessary to write anything worth posting. Thankfully my reasons for all of this busyness are the best kind, my family visited me here for 1 whole month! It was awesome! I have lots of posts to write so I suppose I should start at the very beginning, July 19th, when they landed in Beijing!


My father, mother, sister, brother-in-law, and niece all came to visit! Yippee! They providentially booked on the same flight as a dear friend of mine, and the youth group from my home town who were also coming to visit us! Our airport reunion was joyful and complete chaos.


We proceeded to tour Beijing sometime with the teen group, and sometimes on our own for the next 4 days. We made one of the most unlikely tour groups ever comprised. Two senior citizens, 2 preschoolers, 1 toddler, a pregnant woman, and 3 otherwise able bodied adults with the occasional throw in of 2 more senior citizens, 7 teens, and 3 extra adults. As you can see, the likelihood of us easily touring one of the world's largest cities in the summer heat safely and comfortably was against us. But despite our handicaps, we had a great time!



We visited all the major tourist attractions (Walking Street, the Great Wall, Tienanmen Square, Forbidden City, Olympic Village, Summer Palace, and the Silk Market). We also enjoyed some long desired hard ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery (hard ice cream is a luxury for us). We traveled mostly by subway since Beijing traffic is obscene, and thankfully we never got separated or had any trouble finding our way. At the summer palace we accidentally climbed all the way to the top of the palace (no small feat with all those little ones), but at the Great Wall we cheated and took the cable car up! We coincidentally picked a car that said it housed Bill Clinton during his presidential visit to Beijing. We figured it was a gimmick that was probably printed on every car, but turns out it wasn't :-) and we actually picked just the right car. I can't tell you how cool it was for me to be standing on top of the great wall with my entire immediate family! What an amazing thing! Who gets to do that? I am so thankful to God for giving me that precious adventure with them.



So stay tuned for my hopefully much more frequent posts with some of our funny and crazy stories from the last month. I'm finally starting to feel enough like myself again to write some things down in coherent form!





Comments

  1. KatieJuly 23, 2012 at 2:49 AM

    I love being in your blog:) It was amazing and we miss you all!

    ReplyDelete

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