Yeah, yeah, I'm awake.

I was all smug yesterday because I thought I was over the jet lag. "I flew 7000 miles and it didn't even faze me!" ha. Here I am awake since 4:30 and I am hungry and not sleepy at all!
I thought I would update since yesterday because I forgot some stuff. There are some new pictures over in Flickr. Look at the one of the little boy's hiney. So cute! :) A lot of the little kids here wear something called split pants which are basically that. Split right up the middle. They don't wear diapers so when they have to go to the bathroom, they just squat down and go wherever. David and I thought that might be a rather breezy and comfortable way to go with as warm as it was yesterday.

In addition to the people selling all kinds of stuff everywhere we went, there were also beggars everywhere. Some of them were very persistant and hard to look at. For example, there was a man with no legs pushing himself along on a wheeled platform, people missing hands or arms and 1 guy who was horrifically burned. It was very sad. There were also a lot of women holding little kids who tried to get you to give them money. It's hard to know what to do in situations like that because you feel so badly and want to help them but don't know if they're trying to scam you. David and I didn't give anyone any money.

There were video cameras and soldiers all over the place in Tiananmen Square. While it didn't make me nervous, it made me very aware that we were being watched all the time. I would have liked to have gone into Mao's tomb and seen him laid out in his open glass sarcophagus. Jackie told us that the wait to get inside was over 2 hours already and it was only 9:30 in the morning. Oh well, maybe next trip. I cannot imagine coming to China on our own because it is so difficult to know where we're going when we cannot read any of the signs. A lot of times it seems like we are going nowhere or going down a dirt road and then we get to a store or tourist site.

It has been really fun to meet everyone who we've gotten to know over the internet for so long. I recognized a lot of people right off because I've become so familiar with them through reading their sites. There are 6 families counting us whose daughters are from Lianjiang SWI. Maggie is one of the oldest. A couple of families got pictures of their daughters in walkers rather than in the giant blow up chair!

I guess that's all for now. Tomorrow is coming. Eek. Yahoo!