China

For the kids' Fall break we took a week long trip to to China. Planning this trip was a little bit spur of the moment. We never thought we would be able to take a family of 4 to China because of the additional Visa costs on top of all the other expenses ($180 Visa per US passport, Chinese pay the same to come to the US). But when we realized a round trip flight was only 20k miles on a partner airline, and there was availability, our dreams of taking the kids to the Great Wall and Worlds Expo in Shanghai quickly became a reality.

Highlights of the trip, according to Rob and I, were hiking the Great Wall, touring the Forbidden City and Jingshan park, and going to the World Expo in Shanghai. Highlights according to Parrish and Sabrina were the Asian Acrobat show in Beijing, the Blue Zoo aquarium (particularly the turtles) and riding on the passenger tram under the Huangpu river in Shanghai.

You have to be ready for China. Things we packed were our own toilet paper for the public restrooms (hotels, malls and some restaurants were clean and ok). Yes, both girls had to learn how to use the squatters but we tried to find proper toilets when possible. We also packed a sense of humor for the traffic and the crowds, particularly for Beijing. And nobody, let me emphasize, NOBODY queues up for anything.

Packing a winning smile for all the photographs and stares we would get each day. Many Chinese tourists love getting their picture taken with a "Westerner", especially our kids. Mostly our kids. We were well aware that we would gain celebrity status here, but never knew how hard it would be to get through a crowd. Tourist locations where particularly bad. We realized we couldn't stop to take a rest for very long or a crowd would descend around us. Sabrina and I found ourselves surrounded by a bunch of screaming school kids at one point. It was a Beatle moment! But the girls started to tire of it even in the first day. Parrish and Sabrina started to refuse to smile for pictures and actually ran away from a few. The Chinese are so polite and nice about it, but to get anywhere we had to start saying no.

Last thing we packed was a little bit of Mandarin tongue. Rob has been taking classes each week for over a year, I did a 6 month course, Parrish and Sabrina get lessons at school. But Rob was the real hero. Parrish was too shy to speak and it was too long since my last lesson to remember anything of value, other than knowing how to say hi and tell someone how old my children are. However, in both cities, there is English on road signs, in the subways and nearly all the hotels have someone who speaks English, at least the ones we stayed in. When it comes to reading characters, we were all lost, naturally. There was only one restaurant we went into that did not have the English or pinyin translation (English alphabet to express Chinese language). There was a lot of pointing to make our order. Rob knew how to ask a question, but understanding the answer was another story. *grin* Luckily we ended up with something edible, but we didn't always know what we were eating. This actually was part of the fun and mostly worked out for us. We went back to that restaurant for breakfast the next day too.

I've loaded some pictures in these slide shows for sharing:

Beijing_10

Shanghai_10