Stupid Mongo-ri-ians, they come knock down our wall...

For those of you who are not followers of South Park, the title for this post references an episode in which the City Wok guy complains about the Mongolians breaking down the Great Wall. I'd reference the episode for you in a link or with more detail, but I can't find it right now because the Internet filter in China is more restrictive than the draconian filter in the school district where we work, if any of our colleagues can even believe that! (I am emailing my blog entries to my wonderful brother Jim who is posting them for me, BTW, so a huge thank you goes out to him for doing this!!)

Anyhow, today was the day we got to hike along the Great Wall. It was insanely awesome. Actually, it was so much fun that I didn't even notice how cold it was (18 degrees F) and Larry got so sweaty under all of his layers he spent the rest of the day freezing. He was a good sport about it: every time we got to a new station, I would say "Just one more" and he would oblige. While we hiked, we got a lot of mileage out of the "stupid mongolians" jokes from South Park because our tour guide gave a very long and impassioned speech on the bus as we arrived about how the Mongolians WERE always trying to knock down their wall! (Video forthcoming, MJ.) We hiked to 5 stations and back in the 90 minutes we were allotted and it was the first time we were somewhere that we didn't have to stay with the whole group and go the pace of the slowest person. Lar and I hiked with M, a college student/ brother to adopted girl in our group and had a very pleasant time.

Pics above include Lar and I at the wall, me looking cold but happy, and Lar on patrol spotting in-coming Mongo-ri-ans.

As I send this to Jim to be published, you are all waking up on Christmas morning. We are exhausted, but are finally flying to Abigail's capital city tomorrow (as you are all sitting down to your Christmas dinner). Our "Christmas dinner" this evening was Yaki Tori and sushi.

Tips for future adopting families:

Be prepared for "adoption tourism". It means that you will have several days of being herded like cattle from one souvenir place to another, from one tourist destination to another. It is exhausting. And all you want is to get your kid. You may not interested in going to the Jade Mall to buy a $125,000 USD jade statue of a bull or the silk factory to buy a silk comforter, etc. But be prepared to do it.