Greetings from Beijing!

Dear friends and family,

The antisipatioin and anxiety sitting on a 12 hour flight is killer let me tell you! Jay and I had a really good flight, a little uncomfortable for two 6 ft kids but hey, we made do. The 15 hour ahead of time adujstment hasn't been bad at all, we got alot of sleep on our flight so we turned our bodies over really easy, no jet lag at all!

Stepping out into the airport we quickly realized we were the only white people around and on are own! We managed to find an info. center after grabbing our backpacks and got the hostel on the phone so they could give directions to our cab driver which was quite the ordeal, which we knew it would be after reading the reviews of the hostel. Jumping into the cab my first instinct was to grab the window lever to roll down the window and escape from the overwhelming humidty. And yes, the door handel fell right off into my lap as I looked over at Jay we couldn't help but become histerical. So, everyone knows that asians are horrible drivers in the states, sorry i know that's a stereotype but it's true, and let me say that our cab right to our hostel was the scariest cab ride hands down in my life! The crazy thing we realized was that amongst the mad chaous of insanely aggresive drivers, we haven't seen one accident so far, a couple blinkers, no definate lanes, and yet haven't seen one accident! There really aren't any traffic laws or police to inforce them but it all seems to work out I guess.

Our hostel is super nice and very traditional and have only run into one American which is always cool. It's situated back in a pretty sketchy Huton (alley way) but I haven't felt threatened at all once, or anywhere in the entire city, crime seems to be non-existant along with any form of authority.

The second day we hoped on the bus and ventured our way out to "the summer palace." Their bus system is insane, there is about 4 or 5 cars to every bus, which is a lot of buses! Everyone one of these buses is compeletely packed to the max too with people, there is barely any room to stand and the bus it seems is never too full for one more! We road the bus for an hour and it cost us about 40 cents one way! The summer palace is incredible and massive in acrerage, i would pounder about 50 acres! There is a massive lake in the middle of the park and on the hillside there's a huge pagoda dedicated to the buddha. On the other side of this hill we were walking through this forest of super old trees, some 300 years old, and then came to a clearing and looking up this hillside to see the massive palace built into huge boulders on this hillside, truly incredible. We rented a boat and road around the lake which was cool until we realized how hot it was and decided to head back as sweat dripped down our forheads! Amongst the thousands of people at this site, we remained two of no more than 10 white people we saw, pretty cool being the minority I must say.

Today we check out the "temple of heaven," which was again set amongst a massive park of diverse plant life that dates back nearly 300 years. The actual temple of heaven is pretty breath taking and don't worry, I got a sweet jump shot in front of it! Jay seems to be a little skeptical of the jumps shots but after he saw what it looked like I think I sold him! Also, some food for thought, they didn't use one nail to constuct the temple! There is this circle called "the echo wall" and you can stand in the middle of the circle and yell and it yells back at you even louder apparently. So, we get to the top of this place and there are tons of Chinese tourists taking pictures on the circle but no one is saying anything, so Jay and I thought it would be funny to stand on the circle and yell something really profane because no one knows Enlgish. I havent laughed that hard in a long time as Jay stepped up to the circle and at the tops of his lungs yelled, mom you can skip to the next paragraph, "PENIS!" All the Chinese just laughed and thought we were so funny, little did they know!

We peddled around an international marketplace with the same crap you see in Mexico and everywhere else which was rather dissapointing while getting our arms tugged and pleaded to buy all their worthless junk but hey ya gotta do it to say you did it right? After walking probably 10 miles today we thought it best to risk our life and take a cab home and re-group.

The people's faces seem motionless on the streets but we have encountered situations where we've been greeted with kind hearts and smiles and it's definately a completely differen't culture than we're used to but we're loving it! No problems yet so cross your fingers!

Gumbai,
Grant