China Trip

Last year Dave and I took a trip to visit my sister who lives in China. This is the book I put together about that incredible experience. I use heritage makers to put it together.

China - Forbidden City

If you have never heard of the Forbidden City, it is something that you will enjoy researching. Those who were brought to live in the Forbidden City stayed their for life. It is a huge city inside Beijing. We got a tour guide and after 4 hours we barley saw 1/3 of it. There are 999 rooms throughout the city. '9' is a royal number. You will see it symbolized in many areas, on doors, roof tops etc. Only royalty can have 9 of anything. That is the most perfect.

There is a movie called "The Last Emperor" which does a great job telling about the ending of the Forbidden City starting a huge change to the China we know today.

Some of the customs from China's history are extremely interesting! The one that fascinated my a lot was the binding of girls feet. It was a mark of beauty to have a 3 1/2 inch foot, the size and shape of a lotus flower. It was extremely painful but a sign of great beauty. For her wedding, the young girl was judged on the shoes she made for her small feet. This was done for 1,000 years. No one really knows how it began, but it did start with royalty. It only ended in the early 1900's.

Another custom that is seem a lot is raised door steps. Some are just an inch or two, others several inched tall. It is meant to keep the evil spirits out. You must step over, not on top of the door step.

I'd love to put more pictures here, but there are too many to chose from. I am working on a book with LOTS of pictures. I will post it when it is complete.

China - Hu Tongs

This is a picture of my mom sitting with a couple outside their home. Everyone was really great about having their pictures taken.
The Hu Tongs are a part of China I have never heard of before. It is where a large part of the people live, kinda like villages. You find them everywhere if you know how to look for them. You can be going down all the main roads for years and not realize the villages hidden off the main streets. It is like going down an alley that opens up into its own world. Families live down walkways with doors that open off the walkway into their courtyard where 1 - 3 families might live. It is really hard to explain in words! It's like nothing I have ever experienced here.
During the Olympics, hundreds of them were destroyed. People protested and not all of them were lost.
In these villages, they even share bathrooms. Have I mentioned that their toilets are just holes in the ground? I couldn't bring myself to use any of them. I could manage a whole day until I got back to Paula's. I got some pictures of them if you want to see them.

China - Our Adventure Begins

My oldest sister, Paula, lives in Beijing, China. This year I got to go to China to visit her and her husband, Carl. I met my Mom, Merlene (sister) and Tim (brother-in-law) over there for a two week visit. Dave joined us for a week as well. We had so much fun! Paula and Carl have lived in China for 4 ½ years, so they knew all the best places to take us to give us an in-depth feel of China. We got to see the tourist sites like ‘The Nest’, the Great Wall, several markets, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven etc. but more fascinating to me was the places tourist don’t normally go like the local markets, farming communities, the Taylor shop and then how the x-pacts live, with maids, drivers, American toilets even being able to attend the LDS Church, American branch. They have 3 branches in Beijing; two American one Chinese. The American and Chinese Branches by law are not allowed to mix, even in social situations. I will talk more about this a little later. We also ate at a lot of Chinese restaurants that were GREAT!
I have broken our adventures into sections, instead of waiting until I have the whole thing written up, I will post it in sections. Hope you will enjoy reading about our adventure in China.

China - Great Wall

The Great Wall of China was our first tourist stop. Paula decided to take us to this part of the wall that is a little less visited than other parts where they built it up for the Olympics. This part of the wall was awesome! We were there at an off season, so it wasn’t ‘wall to wall’ people which was nice. From the parking lot we walked through the market at the base of the mountain, Paula told us to just look forward and not stop and talk, we would do that when we came back down. Two years ago my mom and dad came to visit here, my dad was so sick and week that it took every bit of energy for him to walk and at times be carried just to the foot of where you could enter the Great Wall. He wanted to so much to be on the Great Wall of China. He died less than a year later.
The wall was quite amazing. Some of the things I thought were interesting in the construction are the steps. There was NO consistency in them. Some steps were over a foot high others were just and inch or two high. The view was spectacular even at this time of year before all the trees have gotten their new leaves. It would be easy to spend an entire day walking along this part of the Wall, since Paula has been here before she showed us the view but had us walk the easier part. We were all thankful for that!
As we were stopping and taking pictures along the way we had the privilege of meeting a nice young couple from Switzerland. He took some picture of our group, which was nice to have some of us all together. We crossed path with them a few times.
On the way home we stopped at a potter shop. The owner met us as we drove up, remembering Paula she knew Paula liked to see the workshop (not open to the public) so that is where she took us first. It was a relatively small building with 12 or so painters working. It was interesting to walk around and get a close look at what they were doing. None of them spoke to us J I’m sure we seemed weird to them. Then we went into their warehouse, so to speak. Each of us bought something and we were on our way.