Our first day in Beijing

Ok, how blogger works in China is totally random...sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I can't seem to figure out a way to move the pictures into order...it won't work the way I can do it at home. So, I will add a lot of verbage to explain them all...

We are having a great time...which is fantastic since I didn't think I would, being the cautious person I am. It's miserably cold, but the outings have been extremely interesting and the Great Wall area is amazingly beautiful. The massive size of some stores, population, amount of apartments in the city...it's mind-boggling. I believe this is a picture I took of the Great Wall while riding back to the city on the bus:

People have gone on about how the food in China is not like the Chinese food in America, but everything I've eaten here tastes just like the stuff I get at home...bok choi, sweet and sour chicken, chicken and rice with chili peppers, pork with chilies, tofu soup, etc. Perhaps knowing that we're American, they didn't bring out the things that would cause us to wretch, like a duck with its head on...We probably only got the items that they know fly ok with us. Also cuisine is different depending where you are in China--very different--so you really can't go to one part of China and say, "This is what Chinese food is." I only ate the veggies and rice at this meal, but they were delicious:

Pictures from climbing the Great Wall...the wall goes on and on...

The wall was finished in the Ming Dynasty:
We took a small glass cable car up to the top of one of the mountains with the wall...This was my favorite part of the trip so far...the views were AMAZINGLY beautiful. Pictures I took while on the cable car:

The icy cold wind was cutting up there. We got our excercise and went a little farther than the other fams. We realized how far we went when we turned around and had to walk back up a LOT of stairs...ha ha:

On the way to the Great Wall: