(The flight TO China is MUCH less crowded than the flight BACK to the US, as we were to find out.)

Beijing Airport finally arrived, thirteen hours later – right on schedule! We found, to our delight, that China Time is EXACTLY twelve hours from our Midwest time – no clocks to reset. (Incredible as it may seem, this enormous country operates on just ONE time zone. Thus, sunrise in our coastal area was around 5 AM, and sunset about 9 PM.) A brisk walk across the hot, humid concrete runway to a straphanger bus, which we shared with about forty Chinese, to the terminal building – a big, dingy block structure (get used to it – this is China) where a doorway said "Entry". A hundred yards down the hallway, we hung a left into Customs & Baggage. This room was about as big as a football field, with several hundred milling Chinese in it, all apparently converging on the dozen bored-looking soldiers verifying internal passports. Mike scouted ahead, and found us a pair of much faster lines (far more orderly, too – apparently foreigners and Chinese who've lived abroad now know about forming queues!) to get our "arrival cards" taken and passports stamped. This room felt air-conditioned – although not much. A quick look at the roof units, and I estimated they hadn't been replaced since the Sixties. But it was better than what awaited us outside.

We took a quick inventory of ourselves. Other than Barb's cassette player no longer working, my inflatable airline pillow getting ripped (but I did that), and a strap ring coming off my carryon bag, we seemed to have made it through the flight largely unscathed. Once through the line, we ambled over to one of the three baggage carousels, and pulled our bags off the line. We had all heard the horror stories about lost luggage – our toilet kits and one change of clothes were in our carryon bags, just in case. However, we found all our luggage. Then we hooked as much stuff together as possible, and pushed our way through one of only two exit doors to the waiting area. The heat out there was like walking into a Chinese laundry at full steam – even my eyelids sweated! We had been told we would be met by our Bethany representative, but nobody was in sight. We probably were hard to find anyway – the entire thousand or so Chinese appeared to have migrated through the customs line and out into the waiting area. Christie-from-Dallas eventually scouted around and located Jenny, our Chinese facilitator for Beijing – who was carrying a ridiculously small handwritten paper sign. Once she found us, though, Jenny took charge immediately, marching us across eight lanes of Chinese traffic to the parking lot, and across that to our baggage van. We checked our cases, then took our carryons into a - Oh sweet relief! Oh rapture unexampled! – bus that was AIR-CONDITIONED!!!

On the twenty-minute ride to our hotel, Jenny gave us our first Chinese lesson: "Nii hao" (hello) and "Xie xie" (thank you) – good enough to get started. She also explained the first change in our itinerary: we would not be put up at the CITS Tower Hotel, but at the Radisson SAS, which she assured us was four-star, and just as good. Once we arrived, Jenny also offered to change our dollars into yuan! The reason for this multiplying job description (not unusual in China – the more ambitious typically take second, or even third jobs, because it's the only way to get ahead) in her case is that she is saving up to go to school in Australia, and the Chinese yuan is still not exportable.

So I changed $60 of our cash right there in the lobby, into Y486 (a calculation we would become increasingly adept at ourselves). Then, up to our room, where we discovered "four-star" in China apparently meant a Ramada-Inn-size room with twin beds and a bath, a TV with HBO, a coffeepot, mini-bar, and treadmill(!?). The beds were rock-hard ("motel standard"), and the air-conditioner was woefully inadequate for actual COOLING. It did, however, knock the outside 90 degrees down to an acceptable 80 or so, so why quibble! And we were on the no-smoking floor, as requested. Christy's rollaway bed was delivered inside of half an hour. Altogether, quite acceptable service, we thought.

There was a small party in the lobby, when I went down a-prowling. I thought they had a familiar look to them – lots of white couples pushing strollers with Oriental babies in them. Yes! It was another adoption group, back from a week in Yangchun province. And my, did those babies look cute! The parents, too, had the typical faces of newly adoptive parents: suffused with the glow of happiness you generally see on folks who have just won the Lotto. It was more than just a touching scene – they had all gathered for the grand traditional Massed Babies Picture in the Hotel Lobby – it was also a wonderful omen, I thought, for the success of our own journey. I cooed and ahhed, and wished them Godspeed.

Next, I joined a small party out foraging. The invaluable Jenny pointed out Carrefours, a Swedish-built department store right down the block, and also gave us a short lesson in the Sock-It-To-The-Roundeyes hotel pricing policy: the same bottled water in the room minibar, at Y30 the pint, is on sale at Carrefours for less than Y3 the quart! So four or five of us hiked next door (safety from pickpocketing in numbers, Jenny said), and picked up some water, and a couple cans of Diet Coke (it really IS universal – so is Pepsi!) [and so is this] .

Boy, was Carrefours an experience! Not only is it by far the cheapest way to provide yourself with water and some other sundries; you'll find every Chinese for blocks in there, at almost any hour of the day or night. It has what looks like just about everything, at first sight – from clothes to Weber barbecue grills on the main level, and fresh fish to Pringles on the food level in the basement. However, you can expect to find few familiar American brands – we never could find Christy's favorite Beefaronis or Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup.) And it's all air-conditioned. So the Chinese will go there to shop in the evenings, and stay for hours to chat. It's a lot cooler than being home! (You must understand – very few of Beijing's 12 million people have the luxury of air-conditioning – or heat in winter, for that matter.) I get the distinct feeling that, as small as Chinese apartments are, and as many people as they have living in those apartments, they probably don't go home to them any more than they have to, except to sleep.

When I got back upstairs, I was BEAT – well, I'd been up twenty hours straight. I took my shower, and changed for the night. Then we had one more visit from the estimable Miss Jenny, who clued us in on the proper tipping levels (two bucks American, or Y 15 if you must, for the bellhop), reminded us of the breakfast buffet (included with our rooms) from 6:30 to 11:00 tomorrow, as well as of the tour bus that would be waiting at 9:00, and bid us a pleasant good night.

After Barb, too, showered and collapsed – I can't TELL you how good it felt to be horizontal, at last – we got our three extra pillows from room service, and went to sleep. Of course, MY dratted internal clock sounded the alarm at 3 am. So here I am, writing these notes!

No complaints about the food, anyway – one dines hugely at the buffets, and the food is tasty and in good condition. Speaking of which, one of the pleasanter surprises for us was Christy's successful foray into buffetdom. You see, our little Princess has developed very narrow tastes in food. I know, it's typical for a teenager to subsist for months at a time on the same two basic foods; but it sure does drive your parents up the wall. On this trip, however, she has demonstrated, to us as well as to herself, that she can try out new foods, and yet survive. What a relief!

When we assembled in the lobby , we found a few more of our intrepid band - the Laffans, John and Betty, from East Tennessee State (saaaaa-LUTE!), here for their first baby; John O'Haver, from Ole Miss (whom we immediately christened Big John Teddy Bear), and his charming-beyond-all-reason mother, Julia, here for John's second adoption (Mommy was home with No. 1); and the group's Official East Coasters, Christina and her mother Delores Lynch, and Christy's husband Francis (pronounced "Fran") Murphy. We also found the other couple from Michigan - Ron and Carol Gargala, from St. Clair Shores. Our little group was nearly complete - the remaining families would join us in Shanghai, in two days.

Our first day in China, we were off at nine, heading 60 km north to Badaling and the Great Wall. First, though, a stop at the 30-km mark, to visit the Freshwater Pearl Factory. (Along the way, the delightful Miss Jenny showed us another of her talents: a nice soprano. Today's Chinese lesson was a sweet little lullaby (which I shall HAVE to copy down – I've forgotten it already!), which we all sang after her. It goes, "Shui (pronounced "shway") ba, shui ba / Wo qin ai do bao-bei" – repeat that four times. (We found, the next morning, that besides the simple little melody Miss Jenny gave us for the tune, the words would fit equally well with "Music of the Night", from Phantom of the Opera. Besides, it's a better fit with Daddy's basso profundo.)

Then followed a reading of our children's names, with their translations. We were struck by the repeatedly optimistic note sounded in names for what are, after all, abandoned children: again and again, names like "Daybreak", or "Beautiful Lily", or some such flower, or "Fragrant" this-or-that. "Wisdom" cropped up once or twice, too. All names are given by the orphanage directors, since the babies are all abandoned. They really do love their little charges; like us, they share the hope that their children's lives will be better than their own.

At the Pearl Factory, we were shown one of the large mussels which incubate the freshwater pearls - then, a contest! We were invited to guess the number of pearls within the mussel; guesses ranged from 1 (mine) to 8 (my daughter's); the mussel was opened, and there were more than forty! So Christy (along with Teddy-bear John, who guesses 7) received a free pearl! (I think she REALLY likes China now!)

Then came a tour of the sorting and beading rooms, which wound up (surprise!) at a pearl store, wherein everything possible was made out of pearls – up to a three-foot snarling tiger, and what MUST have been the model for Mushu the Dragon, from MuLan. I liked the three-foot tiger, but – oh darn! – didn't bring along the Y128,000 I'd have needed to buy it. In fact, I had only brought along Y150, expecting to hold down my losses on this trip, at least. Fat chance: like almost every tourist trap on our route, they took VISA.

Back in the bus, we continued to the Great Wall at Badaling. You could tell the Wall was approaching – suddenly the wide, level fields gave way to tall, green hills, with sharp outcroppings of rock. A couple of hairpin turns, and we came out through a village – probably there since the Qin Dynasty! – and up to The Wall itself. The Chinese government, having reopened the nation to capitalism in the Seventies, was not long in realizing that there was a pile of money to be made here – after all, what ELSE do Roundeyes know to visit in the Middle Kingdom? – and embarked on a multi-million-yuan restoration of the Wall. (As Jenny pointed out, "For each new dynasty, the Emperor's FIRST duty was to repair the Wall, and THEN to build his Tomb.") It shows – the Wall at Badaling had none of the dilapidation we've read about in some sources; it looked as good as most American tourist traps we've seen.

We had expected to climb a few steps to the top, and then to stroll along the ramparts, besieged by vendors. Well, the vendors have been cleaned up, and spaced in orderly fashion along the walls of the Wall restaurants. You MAY get pestered along the ramparts, for all we know – we never made it. The steps are steep, and worse still, uneven: one tall step alternates with two or maybe three short ones. It's guaranteed to wear out all but the stoutest stairclimbers – or children, who were present that day in flocks.

Miss Jenny explained that the Chinese school year lets out for six weeks the third week of July, so we had come to Badaling at the height of the internal Chinese tourist season. Additionally, we seemed to have hit the same weekend as some sort of International Children's Chorus Festival. There were literally hundreds of bright-eyed children in primary colored outfits, scampering up & down the steps, posing in great groups for pictures – and practicing, with enormous charm, their "Hello" and "How are you?" on the exotic foreigners who suddenly appeared among them.

We stopped, panting, at what seemed to be the half-mile-up guardhouse; once we squeezed through that , we found, to our surprise, that there was a breeze blowing through a small crenelation in the wall. We stayed there, while some of our party continued to the top, regardless of Jenny's admonition to "save some strength for your baby." John O'Haver (the Teddy Bear from Oxford, Mississippi) went storming on up the steps. His mother Julia, a sweet little wisp with a fetching drawl, was instantly mobbed by about a dozen of the aforementioned Chinese Choristers. Her Polaroid camera was the icebreaker – EVERY child in the group clamored to be snapped with this Dream Grandma (who was obviously rich and patently exotic – who wouldn't want to?). It made one of the most charming moments of the trip.

The walk down proved almost as trying as the ascent: the unevenly spaced steps were impossible to negotiate without concentrating, and there were a LOT of them. I felt sorry for John O and the few other members of the group who went all the way to the top, because they had even MORE steps to go back down. John made it – but his knees were shaking by the time he made it back down.

Back in the bus, we were shuttled off to our first visit to a Friendship Store. This is, to put it baldly, A Place Where They Part Foreigners From Their Money. This one had the restaurant we would eat our Chinese luncheon in (also included with the room rents), as well as an Official Chinese Government Cloisonne Factory. Lunch was a communal experience: several Chinese dishes on a lazy susan in the center of a big round table, with everybody spearing their favorite bits as they whirled past. Christy was thus forcibly immersed in Chinese cuisine, and actually liked a surprising amount of it. This was astonishing, from a girl we had pretty much resigned ourselves to raising on chicken soup, Beefaronis and Doritos.

Lunch was followed by a tour of the cloisonne factory – all Chinese cloisonne is handmade, under VERY primitive conditions that reminded me of the foundry I used to work in during my college vacations. (of course, we had no teenage Chinese girls in OUR factory.) Once again, we closed our tour with a half-hour's mad shopping frenzy in the attached Friendship Store. And there, we had our first family falling-out.

After we had explained to Christy that we weren't really in the sort of financial shape that would allow us to drop $60 per store on jewelry she might wear once, then never again, she got upset (probably with good reason) that we did not take advantage of Miss Jenny's offered services as Official Haggler. Here's how it works, as nearly as I can make out.

On your proximate approach, a Chinese salesclerk homes in on you like radar. The item you look as has a tag attached, quoting the price (in yuan, of course). What's you're SUPPOSED to do is offer, say, half. How do you do this, if you don't know Chinese? Two ways – either the clerk knows enough English to understand "Too much", or "Not 200 yuan – 100!"; or she will whip out a large-number calculator; on this, she will enter a lower price, and hand it to you; you type in your number, she calls in the floorwalker, who enters HER price; you enter another price, and the deal is, eventually, done.

The second way is to call in Miss Jenny, who conducts basically the same negotiations, except in Chinese. I like the "calculator method", myself - it's really an interesting system of commerce, which doesn't rely at all on either party knowing the other's language! The problem with any of these methods from OUR perspective, of course, is that Barb, while an excellent shopper (she's a wonder at thrift stores and garage sales), is a terrible bargainer. If she thinks the price is fair, she'll just pay it: if she thinks you're overpriced, she'll just walk away, rather than haggle. And our daughter, of course, has played scads of computer sims (such as Colonization) where haggling is part of the winning strategy. Besides, she thought (probably rightly), that we were just wasting money by paying full price. Anyway, some harsh words were exchanged, but we did make up on the bus ride home. It's a long two weeks in a strange land, if you can't stay on speaking terms!

And although we DID employ Miss Jenny's services at this store, it actually ended up costing us MORE money!. A couple of small cloisonne jars drew Barb's fancy, just as we were leaving the store. Miss Jenny beat them down from the list price of Y360 each (about $45) – but only if we agreed to take two, for Y500.

That afternoon, back in Miss Jenny's room at the hotel, we met the CITS agents, who extracted $3,940 (US funds – hundred-dollar bills, please) for the tour, covering air travel in China, hotel rooms through August 12th, two meals a day, and tours in each city, including facilitators/translators and drivers.

Besides lightening our load a bit of all that nasty cash, we also reduced our luggage burden by one. We had been the heaviest-laden family off the plane in Beijing; now we had a chance to cut that down and spread some goodwill at the same time. Bethany had loaned us an additional suitcase, if we would carry a set of plaques for the China Adoption Agency. We handed these over as well, and then repacked our remaining load. It turned out we could do without the large black rolling duffel that had caused us a good deal of trouble at the airport. So, upon hearing that Miss Jenny was interested in travelling to Australia or the United States to complete her doctorate someday, we offered her the duffel. Amusingly, she asked, "What's a duffel?" (not the sort of word one learns in Chinese English classes, apparently); but she was certainly grateful when she saw it. So were we: one less bag to wrestle across China's airports. After a last reminder that we were to be packed and ready to be picked up at 8:30 AM, we all retired for the night.

Day Three (Saturday, August 1st) - We had planned to swim in the hotel pool last night, but the day's activities had so exhausted everybody that we all sacked out by 8:30 – 9:00. However, we still got up plenty early – although 5 AM WAS better than the previous day's 3:30! After breakfast, with our luggage sent on to Beijing Airport, we took our carryons and boarded the bus again, this time for the Forbidden City.

It's impossible to describe our sense of wonder and awe at this majestic work. Acres and acres of plazas, with hundreds of buildings, all behind immense walls, designed for the use and security of just one man – the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom, the Son of Heaven. We walked, and walked, and walked. We were, of course, not alone: the Forbidden City is as much a tourist draw as the Great Wall. Throngs of Chinese (some other Round-eyes, as well) ebbed and flowed around us as we progressed through this great edifice, with our guide stopping every couple of hundred feet to point out a set of roof decorations, or a bas-relief, or one of the several throne rooms.

Miss Jenny told us she had often come here as a girl, when her family lived in Beijing, and prices were lower; she would come every week, and stay all day. It certainly showed: her command of the thousand and one features of this marvelous place was detailed and impressive, her ability to bring these ancient Chinese buildings alive for us never flagged. In fact, we repeatedly drew a small crowd of OTHER tourists, who apparently either came on their own, or weren't getting this kind of information from THEIR guides. On its face, our tour of the Forbidden City doesn't sound like much: a two-hour trek through a bunch of old buildings in the August heat. But trust me: I for one was enthralled, and would gladly recommend the tour to anyone I know. Just make sure you get Miss Jenny for your tour guide!

I gotta say, Tiananmen Square could not possibly match that. Although once again, we could not help but be impressed – no one could – by the sheer size and magnificence of the largest paved yard in the world, as well as by the equally impressive buildings set around it. But it was, unfortunately, still August, still midday; and no amount of interesting detail could make us want to spend very much time on a treeless expanse of asphalt. We did discover, however, that during the Tiananmen Student Uprising in 1989, Miss Jenny, then a third-year University student, had come to the square as well, and stood for a while with her fellow university students. However, her father, an instructor at a military academy, feared both for his daughter and for his family's financial wellbeing , if she were caught or – heaven forbid! – killed. So he took her home.

Anyway, back to the present. After the obligatory group picture in front of the Great Entrance (the one with Chairman Mao's portrait hanging over it) – which occasioned a lot of good-natured ribbing later between "those who squatted" (the women) and "those who wouldn't" (the men) – we headed off to a jade factory & store. Here, Barb & I finally made our daughter proud: Momma found, and I haggled for, a lovely jade necklace for our daughter-to-be (when she gets older, of course – Big Sister will wear it FOR her, in the meantime). It was priced at Y480; I got them down to Y240, even without Miss Jenny! We were ALL proud of dear old Dad for that effort.

That is, until we heard that Big John O'Haver had got the Y38,000 soapstone horse for just Y5,000!

Then we had a quandary to solve: we were still not due at Beijing Airport until 4:00, and here it was just 2:30. What to do? Sit in the air-conditioned bus, or visit – a silk shop! There Momma found a quilted silk jacket for Jade, and Christy was rewarded for her patience with us old fogies by acquiring her very first Chinese silk jacket! We evaded the peddlers selling postcards – and something new this stop: a thin young man, playing an er-hu (a Chinese fiddle), giving us an off-key rendition of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" – I thought he wanted coins, but no, he wanted to SELL us his er-hu! (There were more slung on his back) No, thanks – or, as Miss Jenny instructed us, "Bu-sh!"

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