Saturday, May 19

Discovered that  it is not possible to post blogs from China, so I will have to save them in a word processor for later posting.....

We start the day with a morning stroll around a few different blocks and a Burger King breakfast.  We found a local market and watched the making of broad noodles by hand.  Here we finally learned how to ask "How much?" in Mandarin. "Doa shao tien?"  A lot of laughter in the market as we tried out our new command of that phrase.  Doesn't help much because we get the reply in Mandarin as well.  They have to show us the amount on their calculators.



Our team finally arrives and we meet Josephine and Marion who are our interpreters.  We are expecting two mini-buses to transport us to the hotel, but there is only one.  We pile the luggage in the back seat and between the seats.  We cram in and a couple of us sit on the floor because there is no more room in the bus.  It is almost 2 hours to the hotel in rush hour traffic.  Confusion reigns at the hotel.  Check in takes almost 3 hours.

Some of the team members make their way to the lobby restaurant and wonder where everyone else is.  Everyone else is actually on the 2nd floor enjoying a full course buffet served on an 8' foot lazy Susan with a whole array of plates of food.  After the restaurant group was served, and paid for their orders, we carried our plates upstairs to join the smorg.  Since so many never got the memo, there was a mountain of food to box up to take to the orphanage in the morning.
We return to the airport by taxi to meet our team arriving on Air Canada.  We wait a long time so amuse ourselves by helping the people holding up signs for incoming passengers by guessing who they might be.  Mikki was looking for Mr. Pruitt.  He wasn't too impressed when we ID'd him and welcomed him to Beijing.  Alice (Shou Tien is her Chinese name) was looking for a group of Canadians and I told her I was looking for my sister and her name was Evelyn, too.  Matthew and I became the International Greeting Team and greeting the Korean flight crew and passengers, as well as the many Chinese passengers.  Qwa ying is "Welcome" in Chinese.