Sunday....More Beijing...Hello Nanchang

Well, today Jessica picked us up at the hotel in her Honda CRV. This small SUV typically seats 5 people, We squeezed in 8....typical Chinese style! No carseats, seatbelts, kids sitting on adults' laps in the back seat. Real safe stuff especially when everyone here drives like a maniac. We did a little car tour around Beijing seeing Tianemann Square and the Forbidden City with Mao's big mug shot on the front. We would have had to park a mile away and walked back to the sites in 95 degree weather, so we settled for seeing these from the car. David, Lori and I have all been there before and these places have little significance for our girls at this point in their lives. They truly wouldn't have gotten it. We wound up at a nice little restaurant for lunch that Jessica was familiar with and then went on a Hutong tour. A Hutong tour consists of riding in rickshaws with a bicycle driver in the front. They drive through the back alleys wheresmall residential areas exist; small primitive homes reminiscent of old Beijing. It took 3 rickshaws to cart us around ...these poor drivers who were small, older Chinese men were carting us larger Americans around...we really must have been a funny sight! We took a tour of one of the traditional courtyard homes and finished the ride. Back to the hotel, loaded up our suitcases and then off to the airport for our flight to Nanchang in Jiangxi Province. Of course, the airport stuff is never easy and in China it's 10 times worse....the crowds, the pushing, and dragging suitcases and 4 children...well, you get the picture....The flight was about 2 1/2 hours and we arrived in Nanchang at 8;30pm. Here we met our guide Bruce Yu , who is an expert at Heritage tours and friends with the director at Abbey's orphanage. In China, everything is about connections and money....enough said. He drove us to the hotel and we crashed for the night.Everyone's prayers are working because our girls who are ordinarily very well behaved children have been extraordinary behaved children. They have been real troopers even when we adults have been on the verge of a meltdown.