April 2014

On Friday, we jumped in a car and headed to the airport to begin our trip to China! For the next 8 days we’ll be in Beijing and the Great Wall. We have a great itinerary planned and look forward to sharing the highlights (and perhaps some lowlights 😉 of Maile’s first trip to China!

We tried to explain how long the flight was to Maile, but she doesn’t quite grasp the concept of time yet. Even saying “24 episodes of the Fresh Beat Band” or “8 viewings of Frozen” didn’t really register, although she did agree to do her best to prove whether we were right or not.

All packed up and ready to rock - Maile Girl before the flight...

My favorite part of the flight was definitely when Maile stood on her seat and shouted for the whole cabin, “We’re almost in China!” … a good effort to generate some excitement for our impending arrival, but, unfortunately, we had 7 hours still to go. Maile did great on the flight though – she watched Frozen, did some origami with Mommy, colored a bunch, visited with her friends and even got about 3 hours of sleep.

... and Maile's first picture in China at the Beijing airport. A little travel weary for sure and not quite sure and still shaking off some sleep from the flight...

Everything went smooth with our arrival. We are traveling with 3 other families and there are 5 kids total – all rising Kindergarteners or 1st graders at Presidio Knolls. They get along fantastic so far and they worked out some second and third wind energy at the airport running around all over while the adults got things organized.

We were met at the airport by a woman from the tour agency we hired. Her name was Alice and Maile and she became fast friends. She quizzed the kids a bit in Mandarin and while they started out shy, after a few minutes they were responding and chatting a bit.

Maile and Alice, who works with the tour company we are using. Not a huge surprise, but Maile made fast friends with her - quite the charmer our little girl!

We got our first taste of Beijing traffic on the way to the hotel, took about an hour and saw many random accidents along the way. Our hotel is fantastic, the Marriott Imperial Mansion. It’s centrally located and the rooms are really nice. After unpacking a bit, we decided to push Maile a bit to try to get on local time as much as possible and headed out to explore a bit and find some dinner. Our hotel is just off Wangfujing (the “Walking Street”) Street. It’s kind of like multiple huge malls crossed with Times Square. You walk down the middle of the main street drag (all pedestrian walking, no cars) and lined on each side our huge stores and malls – all the famous brand names you would expect plus a number of Chinese ones you’ve never heard of. Not sure it was the best spot to go in search of food, but eventually we realized that like all malls, there were food courts/restaurants on one of the floors. They had all types of restaurants, we ended up at an Udon place – seemed like it would be a little easier to order and a way to ease into things. So yes, our first meal in China was … Udon.

Mommy and Maile exploring Wangfujing in search of dinner...

Our first meal in China - Udon - easing in to things 😉

After the meal, Maile began crashing hard, so Daddy and Mommy took turns carrying her back to the hotel. We were all pretty exhausted from the day, so everyone (even Daddy) went to bed by 8:30 PM local time. We slept great … until 2 AM – at which point Maile Girl was up and at ’em and ready to begin her day. Daddy was pretty jetlagged too, so we got up and worked on our journal for about an hour.

Writing about our trip to China in our journal ... at 2 AM

Hard at work on our journal...

After that Mommy woke up for a bit and read some books with Maile and then we somehow convinced her to try to go back to sleep. So at 4 AM, she closed her eyes again and managed to sleep for another couple of hours. Not bad actually – think we did an okay job navigating the crazy jetlag.

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