Burnett___Family-O-Rama

I guess I'd have to say I had the best birthday ever in Beijing. (I did miss you though, Mom.) Our first breakfast at the hotel--east meets west in a breakfast buffet form. (And I thought I would lose weight in China!) Then we met our wonderful tour guide, Susan for a tour that went first to the Lama Temple. It's a form of Buddhism. I guess the highlight for me from there was seeing a big sign with part of our daughter's name on it--Xiang means incense. And hoo doggies was there a lot of incense going on!

Our next stop was the Summer Palace--used by many of the imperial families. Very beautiful--lots of sculptures and beautiful furniture--wonderful ornamentation on the buildings. ***Tip for anyone planning to do this--bring a tiny tape recorder. We were tipped off to do this and have been taping our tour guides. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for a record of all this fascinating info.*** Our next stop was the pandas at the Beijing Zoo. Many pandas, mostly doing what you usually see pandas doing--sleeping. But some were a bit more active. All were super cute. Our favorite part of the regular tour was definitely the Temple of Heaven. It is not particularly Buddhist, but a place where the "High God" was worshipped. Very interesting indeed. Here's a shot of me outside one of the buildings.

Then, just as we thought the fun was ending, we started to talk about Kung Fu on the way back to the hotel. Our guide told us about a great Kung Fu show in Beijing and then decided to take us there! We ate at a "noodle joint." Very fun, more real than the official tour stops for food. Then we went to the Red Theater for a truly amazing show. We're not sure if they were actual Shaolin monks, former monks or just Shaolin practioners, but whoa! Here's just one picture from the show. It was awesome--there was a story line about a little boy who becomes a Shaolin monk. Your basic "boy walks on path training in awesome wushu way, boy loses path with help of girl, boy feels bad about the whole losing path thing, boy repents and atones with cool iron body tricks, boy regains path and becomes the new head of the monastery" story.

What a birthday! Still...we kept getting distracted at all of these places. Our guide started laughing at us, as we kept looking wistfully at tiny Chinese girls as they passed by...Soon, so soon