Nancy's Report from China

I just read the post Gary placed up when I was napping before; now it is my turn as he naps. We just got in from wandering around Wangfujing (shopping street). Our group of 3 families had dinner out and what an adventure that turned into. Not every place can speak English and even if they can there can still be large communication barriers if you try asking a follow up question. We have learned to ask for englich menus with pictures in them. At the very least we can point to them and nod yes please. So much for the little mandarin I tried to learn I have been doing NI Hao and Xie Xie: hello and thanks. Yes I am in need of a refresher with our language book because I feel like I am not making enough of an effort I really do not like tourists who do not at least try to say a few things in the local language.

We found the exotic food area vendors with everything from scorpions to star fish to seahorses on a stick to be fried up for you. Some of these bugs were still squirming on the stick. EW! And Oh MY!! No one in our little group was brave enough to try these delicacies. We will put up pictures later. Someone else eating near by described the scorpion as crispy. His friend was not as happy with his taste and made the most amusing faces as he dove for the garbage can to spit it out.

We are getting used to the exchange rate the first night we had been awake for over 24 hours as I was trying to do the math in my head. That was not working well. It is making much more sense now but I do wish I had brought a calculator as someone suggested.
Gary’s impression of the flight and mine was a bit different since he kept sleeping and I napped a few times for an hour at a time. I was awoken once to a call for any medical person on board. I ended up caring for a sick passenger for almost an hour before a MD was located and awakened to take over her care. Nurses can’t prescribe so I was basically monitoring her and identified medication for the flight staff who spoke to an MD by phone at one point. This was a first for me let me tell you. With 6 hours left in the flight her allergic reaction was not so good but she was able to take some of her own medication to help that.

I was able to watch 2 movies that seemed to help pass time since the cabin was very dark as people tried to sleep so reading would have been difficult. I did not get the laptop out due to close quarters and tiredness. Any one doing this journey I highly recommend watching movies to pass time without staring at your watch. I doubt we will be able to do this on the way home with Ben but …on the flight going to China try it. One of the movies I watched was Everybody’s Fine. What a sad movie! I truly hope our family is not like that once Ben is older that he thinks he would have to lie to keep appearances that it’s all ok. The other was an old Audrey Hepburn flick called Love in the afternoon. Very cute and I love Audrey Hepburn.
I have had my stair master workout for the month with the great wall stairs. The view was nice but the area we climbed looked down on the road we traveled to get there wish we could have made it up a bit further to see the other side. We could see the wall winding out over the mountains from where we were which was spectacular. We just didn’t have enough time here. We were only given 1 hour. This is the one thing I do not like about organized travel tours. If we had done it on our own we would have spent 3-4 hours here to see as far as we could go. Lunch was nice and all the food was good and recognizable. So far we have found options that were not too strange for our tastes. The Hutong tour was interesting but a bit sad. The area felt really run down and living quarters were small with paths between some areas of the home from the kitchen to the dining/living room area one would have to go outside. What they called a courtyard felt more like an alley way. I can’t imagine what that is like in the winter as Beijing can get quite cold. They say there is a strong community bond that is not seen in apartment living here in the Hutong. I suppose it was needed to survive but also due to living so close. I appreciate the peak at history in this region but feel sad that some still live in such run down conditions. Not all were so run down but still it is not what we would be used to at all.

Well that is today’s adventures.

In addition to our blog not being able to be accessed here I am not able to send email from my normal address so if you send me an email I can read it but not respond. I will try responding from the Yahoo email address: frankwisdom09@yahoo.com

We shall see if we can keep this up daily. In Nanjing I do not think our hotel has internet we can connect to we will need to try using the business center for updates. If that doesn’t work we will repost once we reach Guangzhuo.

One more full day before we travel to Ben’s province.