Beijing!

A final pic in the Gloria Grand: Kath and Elspeth back in the corner of the lobby where we first received El, one week after she joined our family with tears and trepidation ... She seems a little happier now, n'est pas?















El's first flight, from Nanchang to Beijing. A lot less turbulent than the first flight Maeve and her Xinyu sisters took, but El's not too happy with the cramped quarters ... It's going to be a long long uncomfortable flight back to T.O. for this wee one---and for us!



















Arriving in Beijing's massive airport, we can tell we're no longer in provincial Jiangxi just by the chichi fashions of the locals waiting for relatives and friends ... We meet up with most of our small Children's Bridge adoption group in arrivals, then take a pair of van-buses to our new digs, the Jianguo Garden Hotel, just down the road from Tiananmen Square! Unfortunately, it's too dark to see much when we finally get there.















Next day, we head out to the Great Wall. Apparently it's quite cold, and there's been lots of snow ... We also visit a Jade factory situated on the route between our hotel and the Wall (the ancient Wall looms over the spine of the mountains north of the city). Here's Maeve hamming it up in the Jade factory.














Maeve and I explore the factory while Kath feeds El (who takes a lot longer to eat than Maeve---she's very tiny, a fragile little sister indeed!) ... Here's Maeve posing before a wall of paintings.


















But what we've come to see is this Wall, right dad?


















Kath and El at the base of the Great Wall at Badaling.


















Note all the people on the higher stretches. A few days later Obama came here, walked along this very section, and the news footage we saw showed absolutely no one else on the Great Wall.














A family pic a short way up the Wall ... We didn't get much farther up, as the wind was so fierce and temperatures close to minus 20 with the windchill.














Maeve, meanwhile, was coming down with another dose of the seasonal flu she'd had before our departure. Her cough had come back, and what we at first took for a bit of exhaustion-crying on the Wall quickly became evident to us as something more ...














Maeve was developing a high fever again, and I had to retreat with her to an exorbitant coffee house in the square of shops down at the entrance to the Badaling section ... Here virtually our entire adoption group was encamped, hiding out from the fiercely cold winds, paying 12 dollars Canadian for a mug of Chinese tea (talk about gouging! Starbucks could learn from this shop).

All of our babies were crying their eyes out, even the two jie jies (six year old Rae-Lynn and three year old Maeve---though in Maeve's case, more than just a frozen nose and cheeks were to blame ... She was really sick.)

So our five hour round trip to the Wall resulted in a fifteen minute venture onto the wall itself, followed by a half hour communal cryfest in a cafe. Our adventure turned out to be more Great Wail than Wall!














While the babies gave voice to their wind-chilled contempt for the Wall, Kath dashed up the far side of the Badaling stretch for a final pic ... You can see the square of shops just below, where we were still wiping away the unending tears of the Great Wail :)














Next day Kath visited a pearl market ...














... While I accompanied most of our adoption group to the SOS medical clinic, where they had their new babies examined. El did not go because we'd applied for direct citizenship for her, rather than immigration. On the way back from the clinic our group dropped by the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, so I could complete the last transaction required before El could become a citizen.

This pic shows the play area in the SOS clinic, where Shanghai girl Cloe was checking out the toys with Claire, her new mom. As Claire and Doug live in T.O., Cloe's moving from China's hip cultural capital to Canada's!














Here's our hotel in daytime ... It's situated essentially on the Chang An, the Boulevard of Eternal Peace that leads directly to Tiananmen Square.














One afternoon while Maeve napped away her fever with grandma Lucilla keeping a close eye on her, Kath and I slip out to explore the Chang An with our new wee one. Here Kath and El pose before the Raffles Beijing ... Too bad we didn't get to stay there!














A McDonald's just off the fabled Boulevard of Eternal Peace. Yeah, this is capitalist Beijing, all right.














Clarie and Doug accompanied us on our ramble down the Chang An, and took this pic of us outside the famous---or infamous---Beijing Hotel, depending upon your point of view. This was the place where events unfolded best not talked about here ... Peace to everyone back in Canada!