11
Location: Beijing
Today began with a few too many bowls of Cocoa Puffs and frosted flakes in the Beijing hotel breakfast bar. We headed to Dew Drops for our normal morning service with the little kiddos, and we saw some of our favorites such as Jing Mei, Jing Ming, Mung Bei, and Marshmallow baby. After a morning of playing with the babies, singing in every language we could think of, and tons of thrown toys, we headed to the bus for the great experience of making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, crackers, and some interesting chocolate wafers. The rest of our day was spent wandering the busy streets of a Chinese hutong, a very old neighborhood in Beijing with narrow winding brick streets and lots of people living nearby. The hutong we explored was the Houhai Lake area where we found and bought tons of teas and other souvenirs, and a few of us tested our Chinese knowledge while perusing the shops. A group of us even managed to find some pizza; it also tasted somewhat like American pizza! The bus ride back was a serenade courtesy of all of us jamming out to 2000’s throwbacks and singing/screaming as loud as we could before we arrived back at Yang Fang for yet another fantastic meal. We might have been a bit too excited about the awesome day. Oops.
– Hope (Ni Hao Mom)