Interesting Development

Well, I cannot access the blogger website, so I am glad that I set up mail to blog before that happened. 

Yesterday we went to see the Temple of Heaven and the Drum Tower, took a Three-legged Chicken (rickshaw) tour of a Hutong, which is a narrow road neighborhood, where families share courtyards.  We also got to go to a kindergarten for deaf students, and learned that sign language is almost the same in Chinese as it is in English. 

So many things happened, I seem to have the order wrong.  I will put them in order:

1) added 12 more families, but 11 of the new ones, and all the already here ones went on the tours today
2) Went to the Temple of Heaven, not sure how to add the pics yet through e-mail, but will figure it out.  This was also the first exposure to squatty pottys for the group.
3) Went to a Dai(ethnic minority that live close to the border of China and Burma) restaurant to eat lunch and watch some ethnic dancing
4) Took a Three-legged Chicken tour of a Hutong, which let us visit the deaf school, and a native home.
5) Visited the Drum Tower, climbed 69 steep steps, where the people were awakened at 5am and sent home at 7pm.  They had this to keep track of the time of day, because clocks were not in use for people, the only timepiece was a water clock in the tower.
6) Went to see the Peking Acrobats, a group of young adults that did awesome feats of skill, nearly fell asleep, it was so warm, and we had been walking and seeing sights all day. 
7) Went and ate at the KFC across the street.  It was interesting, the menu has many items that are not available at home.  The place is VERY popular with the locals, but I don't think we will go back.  We were just too tired to do anything else.  That's also why I didn't post yesterday, we got back, and went straight to bed....

Today we will be having a CHI orientation and get to see the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. 

More later.

B