We have Internet at this moment so have just read your comments on the blog. Thank you so much. It means a lot to us to hear from all of you.
We have just arrived in Shanghai but it looks like it will be some time before the ship is cleared and there are quite a few ships ahead of us. Reminds me of waiting on a plane when there are many planes in front of you to take off.
We are going on a mariner club tour(one of the free ones we get from American Express). It will take all day and we are going to have a very late start so I am glad tomorrow will be a rest day before we get to Hong Kong.
Right now I am sitting on the stairs near the gangway waiting to get off in Shanghai and I don't expect it to be soon! One of the disadvantages of a big ship is that you have 2600 people all trying to get off at the same time. Also the ship is so big it can't get into the port at the city so we are usually half an hour away (today it is one hour) from where we want to go. Chinese security is very tough and a bit ridiculous as we have visas, landing cards, copies of our passports-they keep our original passports and they sent agents on board two days before Beijing to thoroughly check us out.
Anyway-back to Beijing and the Great Wall. It took us about one in a half hours to drive to Beijing but this went by very quickly because it was so interesting talking to Peter. He was married at age 20 (don't read this Wesley!) And he and his wife came to China and taught English. They are subsidized by the Australian church as their primary purpose is to evangelize. We were asking him if he ran into any difficulty with the Chinese government and he said it wasn't too bad but then he told us about what happened when they were having a baptism in their living room (they had got an inflatable kids pool for the water). Someone snitched on them and the police arrived at the door. They did not have a warrant so theoretically they couldn't come in so they asked Peter for his papers. There was some minor thing wrong with them so they hauled him off to the police station so he was glad he had distracted them from the baptism. He found a way for them not to "lose face". If if he had accused them of not having a warrant they would have lost face and given him a much harder time.
When we got to Beijing we went right to Tienenman Square and got out and walked right through it. The tour buses were not allowed into the square at all because there was a big communist meeting going on in one of the government buildings. The only bad thing for us was there was a checkpoint we were stuck in for a few minutes. It was a bit scary because the people were crushing me from all sides. Lots of people were giving a strange looks and I realized they were astonished at dad's height. Most of the Chinese men were shorter than me! After a few minutes Peter got us out of the crush. They were only checking very poor looking Chinese for bombs because of the political convention. I guess the Chinese authorities believe in profiling.
The picture of Chairman Mao is much smaller than it looks on television. Karen and Jim took a Cunard tour and they told us all the guides are very young and either they don't know anything accurate about recent history in China or they have been forbidden to talk about it. For example, they described the protest at the square a few years ago as an "incident".
After we walked through the square which is the largest in the world we went into the forbidden city. This is the place where the Emperor and all his family lived. It is huge and very different from what you see in other parts of the world. Open space is substituted for bulk in the buildings. Dad-I liked it. I hope the pictures turned out okay. We walked through it quite quickly which suited me just fine as I was anxious to get to the silk market to do some shopping and we were running out of time.
The silk market wasn't at all what I expected. It was in a building much like a department store only the the stuff was all crowded together and the sales girls approached us just like at the Great Wall. It was like being attacked by locusts. Peter warned us that the place was full of knockoffs which meant you could see polo shirts that look like polo shirts but were not so we were not interested in that kind of stuff. Want to buy a Rolex watch for $20? If you look at something for one second they really harassed you. You really have to bargain here to Peter did this for us and we were very surprised how much they will come down and prices. They might say something cost 500 yuan and you end up getting it for 100. I hate this aspect of shopping but it was educational for shopping in Shanghai. I think I will leave this activity up to dad! We did get some nice little presents for some of you grandkids.
The driver really drove fast back to the ship-about 80 miles an hour-as Wes noted one time, almost as fast as I drove on the M highways in England! Because we took this trip we missed out on taking the bullet train. Dad-on the way back we were driving beside the train tracks and Peter said the bullet train was coming. I was looking the other way and by the time I turned my head it was gone. It is the fastest train in the world. Karen and Jim took it and said it was really neat and smooth.
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