Happy Friday the 13th From Beijing!

We have a super busy day scheduled today. Here's what we'll be up to:

• Meet our guide at 8:30 and then we are off to The Summer Palace (the largest Imperial Garden in Beijing).
• Lunch
• Tour Temple of Heaven
• Tour fresh water pearl factory
• Tour silk factory
• Dinner
• Kung Fu Demonstration. From the brochure this looks like a sort of "River Dance" Kung Fu style. I'll have to let you know.

The weather looks much nicer this morning. Yesterday it was quite chilly and damp for most of the day and didn't clear up until about 4:00 pm. Now the sun is out and hopefully it will be warmer. Tony and I didn't pack for chilly weather!

The food here has been great. So much for thinking I'd lose that "Wait Weight" while we were here and Tony thinking he would have to live on Power Bars alone. John, our guide, has been great about explaining to the restaurants that I am a vegetarian and no...that doesn't mean I want vegetables cooked in fish sauce! John has been helping me practice saying "Wo chi su" which means "I eat only vegetables". John explained to me that in China a good life is directly linked to food (and especially meat) and that many Chinese people would find it hard to understand why if you could afford to eat meat you would choose not to. Yesterday Tony had Sweet and Sour Chicken for lunch (his all time favorite) so all was right with the world. Meal times are an amazing display of food. Multiple dishes are placed in the middle of the table on a very large Lazy Susan and then shared by everyone. Yum! I'm making myself hungry!

It is absolutely amazing to me how many people in Beijing speak English. I am not only talking about only people that work for the hotel I'm talking people in general. Many of the people we have met know at least several words of English and make a real effort to communicate with us. It makes me embarrassed that Tony and I didn't do a better job in our Mandarin Class!

I'm not sure what happened with my picture post. I thought I had posted some pictures and then the actual link to Flickr but it doesn't look like the pictures I posted displayed. All the buttons etc. in Blogger are in Chinese Characters. I did print out sample screen prints of all the screens in English to bring with me just in case (boy, I'm glad I did!) but that doesn't help when messages pop-up! Our computer is set up to display English text but the all the default Blogger text displays in Chinese Characters. All that just to say....I'll try to post more pictures later.

Only 3 more days until we meet Lily!