We are home safe!

Sunday, March 24 -- We made it home safe. We arrived at our house at 12:30 am Sunday morning. We went to bed at 2 am, woke up at noon, picked up Sarah, took a nap at 4:30 pm, woke up at 8 pm ... this must be jet lag. Sarah is doing fine since her return home. She was a good house guest on her vacation and hopefully she is glad to be here in our much-less-exciting condo.

What a great trip! We spent some time today talking about all the incredible things that we experienced. I enjoyed seeing the temples and the mass amounts of incense burning (pictured here). I liked the hutong tour in Beijing. The hutongs are old, old neighborhoods in Beijing. It was interesting to see the culture as we toured in the pedestrian taxis. We laughed about our Peking Duck experience in Beijing--Troy can tell you what happens when you eat too much duck skin. We also laughed at how the tour guides in Beijing and Shanghai called us "big potatoes." (Hoping she meant something like "big cheese" and not "couch potato.") Did you know the slang word in Mandarin for Americans is "big noses?" Apparently they think our noses is big.

And yes, we did buy a knock-off Prada from a vendor in a small hidden room off an alleyway. I didn't want to put that in the blog since blogs are apparently censored in China. After my submission about Mao while we were in Beijing, I could no longer access my blog. Fortunately, I could publish to it but I could not view it. It is working fine here in the US so I think I used the magic combination of words that caught the mechanical censors in China. Fortunately, I made it out of the country.

China is a country that is set to explode on the world scene. I don't have enough knowledge to make any predictions about what their impact will be, but my guess is that my children will be learning Mandarin and English. Learning the language would be the best investment a person could give themselves.

When we toured the Great Wall, we learned that the Wall was constructed as a communications system for the military, and, it was constructed to keep the Mongolians out of the country. If we build a wall at our border, I wonder if people will tour it someday like we tour the Great Wall.

On a sidenote, we also liked the public transportation in all 3 cities--subways, buses and taxis. I wonder how our lives would change if public transportation was the primary vehicle for people.

We are thankful for our week together in Hong Kong and we so enjoyed our time with the SMU group in Beijing and Shanghai.

We don't know how many people read our blog but we are thankful for those who did and kept us in their prayers for safe travel. The prayers worked and we are glad to be home and glad to have had such an amazing opportunity for travel. We will keep publishing photos from the trip on this blog over the next few days.