A Passage to China

Written by Mike:

At this point, Anonymouse doesn't work and Anne has to funnel all pictures and posts through me at home. I organize and post them, then, I cut and paste all comments and send them off to her. Being without the blogosphere is killing her. Hopefully, when she leaves Beijing she'll be able to see for herself.

By the way...about 18 hours to Lilah Rose!!!

And one cute quick note...last night on Skype, we were all crowded around the desktop, and Luke spent the entire time trying to feed pretzels to Anne through the computer monitor. My boy is so generous.


Written by Anne, via email...

We are here in Beijing! The trip was a whopping 32 hours from start to finish, and unbelievably went off without a problem. Even better than without a problem...we arrived in LA and my cousin Carol was waiting for us. Carol lives in San Diego and drove up to hang out with us while we waited out our 7 hour layover. Bein the cool cousin that she is, Carol took us to BEVERLY HILLS to the Beverly Hilton to eat at the world famous Trader Vic's for dinner and Mai Tais. Wow that was fun.

We were looking everywhere for celebrites, in particular a really juicy one like Lindsay Lohan, but alas, only the annonymous beautiful people were out. Trader Vics is an old hollywood restaurant, that is lovingly maintained in its mid century modern glory. So fun to see. There are beautiful pictures all over the walls of stars like Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monrow hanging out poolside and enjoying the bar and restaurant there. We sat in a naugahide booth filled with tiki torches and had a delicious meal and the world's strongest Mai Tais. I mean so strong we could smell the rum before the waiter even got to our table. We had a great time, and it was so great to see cousin Carol!

Carol (the travel partner), Carol (the cousin) and Anne "drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vics"(too dated a reference?)

When we got back to the airport, we got on our plane at 3 am our time for the 13 hour flight to Seoul, Korea. That's when the out of body experiences started happening. First of all, we flew on Asiana, a Korean Airline. Let me tell you, American Airlines have A LOT to learn from Asiana. The flight attendants marched down the concourse to the plane in unison, all wearing beautifully tailored suits, all tall and thin, with perfect makeup and hair, and little jaunty hats with a little starched plume at the back. If you ever read or saw Harry Potter, they looked like the Beauxbaton school girls, I was half expecting them to sigh and little twittering birds to come out of their hair! Also their make up was PERFECT! Can you tell I'm a little obsessed with the Asiana flight attendents? I want to be one for Halloween. We got on the beautifully appointed plane and immediately fell asleep. Sometime in my stupor, they served us a fancy meal of unidentified Korean food, what I mostly remember is that one of the condiments was dried tiny guppies, whole with all body parts intact, on a doiley ready to be sprinkled on the food like tiny anatomically correct croutons. I abstained.
We arrived in Seoul Incheon airport at 5:30am somebody's time. The airport is huge, spotless, and reminded us of "Futureland" at Epcot. It was dark and all the stores were still closed. It felt like we had it to ourselves. We found an Internet Lounge and got a Starbucks (heaven in a cup) , emailed the family and watched the sunrise through massive two story windows. It was calming and fantastic to see beautiful mountains slowly appear as the sun rose. I took a picture of Carol there watching the sunrise.

When we got to Beijing, we met our guide Angela, and went straight to the hotel, took a nap and went for dinner at a great restaurant. So yummy, savory beef with tender baby celery, fried dumplings filled with chives and shrimp, and pork ribs over pumpkin! By the way, my goal is to eat every possible dumpling I can everywhere I go. I can't get enough of them.

"Mmmmmmm, dumpling-y."

After a great sleep, we are off to the Great Wall today and the night market, we can't wait, I promise to take lots of pictures!
We already miss our families, and I think if it weren't for Skype, it would be unbearable after awhile. We love you guys!
Over and Out from Anne and Carol