On The Road Again

We left Beijing some time ago and came to the beautiful and historic city of Xian. The reason I'm so shaky about dates is that we organized ourselves around the computer, and blogging of course, and when we got to Xian, all of our computer stuff went down.

We've been to a sort of Panda Preserve outside of Xian, toured the improbable and amazing Terrac Cotta warriors and of course we've gone through all kinds of souvenir and food markets. The Pandas were to have been a big highlight of the trip and all sorts of photo ops planned around cute children holding cuter pandas, but the Chengdu earthquake put a stop to all that. We saw pandas but the entire zoo, because that is what it was, seemed rooted in the 1950s.

In fact the earthquake has made this trip more relaxing because we are spending more time in each place. But since the temperatures are hovering in the 102 to 105 range, I'm glad that we are moving more slowly. Although early the other morning we all rented bikes and rode 9 miles on the Xian city walls which was great fun.

Today we are going to the Big Goose Pagoda. Sounds like a destination to me.

All the kids continue to bond and the adults as well. It's a very easy group and will be happy to leave them this afternoon as we go off to Guilin andthen to Kate's orphanage and then glad to see everybody again in Shanghai for a day or two before we fly back to the States.