Wednesday July 4th
Beijing, China
Today was our first day in China! I wish I could say it just like that, with an exclamation point. Unfortunately, Ms. Becker woke up not to the soothing sounds of the birds chirping in our courtyard below but rather the sound of my vomit hitting the trash can at 5:30am (plane ride , 14 hours; daylight, 24 hours; time change, 13 hours; vomiting migraine - priceless).

That was my wake up call. Thank you Ms. Bisconti for welcoming me to China. Needless to say as I held her hair back while she quietly whimpered "I want my mommy" we ended up skipping the morning excursions. This only led to a bigger adventure later.

Finally, feeling better, Ms Becker and I headed out ALONE, without cell phone and no way of communicating with the locals. Let's face it "ninhao" only goes so far ( Mind you my student Hoi tried to teach us more, but we kept saying " No worries, we'll be with the tour group".) We had to hail a taxi and have him call our tour guide on HIS cell phone and hope to God we were going where we should. Meanwhile, this is all happening in Chinese and we just smiled and prayed.

After approximately 20 min of driving to what we thought was lunch (According to the tour guide from the morning we were to meet up with the rest of the group for lunch if Ms. Bisconti felt better. ) we ended up being dropped off in front of the Beijing International Sports School. There are NO tourists here and everyone is staring at us wondering what we are doing loitering in front of a school. We began to wonder the same thing and started wandering around in search of a restaurant. There were none...

So after 45 minutes in the 95 degree heat (and I am beginning to feel like I need that trash can again), I decided that I had better scope out someone to use their cell. Sooooo. . . I asked what seemed to be a kind face to use his cell phone. Sounds simple enough. But remember I don't speak Chinese and he does not speak English. After a few awkward moments, (he thought I was hitting on him) Ms. Becker and I got confirmation that we were indeed in the right place.

Our group showed up and we headed to a nice dumpling lunch. Then onto the gorgeous Summer Palace built 800 years ago-right on the water. There we had a refreshing ride on the ferry and headed back to our coach. Then a short photo op to see the giant birds nest building from the summer Olympics.

That is all for now! We need to wash some clothes. Tomorrow is a big day. We will see two very important places in Chinese history, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden Palace.




Thursday July 5th
Beijing, China
1:46am
Okay so when you are dealing with yesterday is today and today is tomorrow jet lag, you write blogs at 1:46am, and when you write blogs at 1:46 am, you end up not sleeping and thinking about putting a glass curio cabinet in your classroom, and when you think about putting a glass curio cabinet in your classroom, you start thinking about all the stuff you will buy in China for that curio cabinet, and when you start buying all that stuff in China for your future curio cabinet then your bag weighs more than 44lbs for the internal flight and your journey on the Silk Road derails. Don't let your journey on the Silk Road derail (rantings of a jet lagged teacher like direct tv commercials)
PS
Ms. Becker is snoozing away:-)
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Pictures from the Summer Palace in Beijing and olympic bird nest stadium: