Tienanmen Square and the Great Wall of China

If you look closely, you can see the Great Wall and some of the towers

Chairman Mao

Tienanmen Square

Complete stranger who got in our picture so his friend could take a picture of him with Ivy

Rick saw this gentleman doing Tai Chi in the park and thought it looked so cool he had to take a picture

We found this park on are walk to Tienanmen Square. It was so beautiful and looked just like a painting.

We made it to Tienanmen Square this morning. It was about a block away from our hotel. There was a big meeting going on (Seventh Asia Europe Conference) so we didn't get to go as close as we would like, but we did get to see the big picture of Chairman Mao.
In the afternoon, we checked into a hotel closer to the airport, so we would be able to get there faster in the morning.
After we were settled in, we took a taxi to the Great Wall of China. It was so amazing! Ivy loved it, even though it was a lot of climbing and walking. She did great. After we rode the tram up walked around, and took it back down, we saw others coming down by way of an Alpine Slide like thing. We wished we would have done that, but not enough to go back up again.
We ate dinner at a restaurant we found outside the hotel. It was called "hot pot" food. They put a couple of big Bunsen-like burners in front of us, with small pots of soup on top. When the soups started to boil, they gave us plates of raw beef and chicken, along with baskets of fresh veggies, to put into the soup. The meat was cut so thin that it cooked in about 1 minute. Then you would take the meat and veggies out of the soup with your chopsticks, dip it in sauce (which cooled it immediately) and eat it. It was really good.
We're turning in for the night, and tomorrow morning we will be flying to Gansu Province to meet LUKE!!!! We are so excited!