Travel Journal - Day 2

Hello everyone! We have made it to the end of day two and what an adventurous day it was! We started it at 2am! Seriously, Kara woke me up at 2am and said she couldn’t sleep. Well, that was noon on our “clock” so I couldn’t blame her. We got up, checked emails, played computer games and went back to bed for an hour before just giving up and beginning our day at 5am! Needless to say, the kiddos are tired tonight. Of course, the parents are also!  I forgot to mention that we have two rooms because the beds are the size of twin beds and there are two in each room. I asked for connecting rooms and they said, “Yes, yes, they connect”. Well, they mean that the wall connects! So, Mike is in one room with a child and I am in the other room with the other child. The girls are switching each night. This should be fun once we throw Lani in the mix!

We went to Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace. Wow! Absolutely amazing! I had no idea the Forbidden City was so vast. It went on and on. It took us about 3 hours just to walk through it and that was walking pretty quickly with a few stops. I tried to take pictures but it was so massive that photos won’t do it justice. I did get lots of video! The Summer Palace was beautiful. We couldn’t have asked for a better day to sightsee. It was sunny and warm all day. There is so much to say about the places we saw today that I can’t summarize it in this post.

We went to a gov’t controlled pearl factory and silk factory! Incredible! The girls, including Elaine, got sweet little pearl necklaces and I got a Jade bracelet. We got to walk through the silk factory and saw mounds of cocoons and watched how they spin the silk. At this point, Meri had fallen asleep on the bus so Mike waited with her while Kara and I went in. Kara and I had fun shopping and picking out gifts together.

We ate at two different Chinese restaurants and the food was pretty good. They had warm Sprite and Coke to drink along with water. One place said their water was okay but we didn’t risk it. We had more soda today than we usually drink in a week! I guess that is why I am still up writing this.

Funny things about today…..

1. The traffic is crazy. People, buses, bicycles all just cut in front of each other. I am amazed we didn’t leave a trail of mangled bodies behind us!

2. The girls are still traumatized by the “squat pots” for bathrooms. Oh my, what an experience. It was worse than I had imagined. We were thankful to get to the restaurants but even there two out of the four stalls had the “gross kind” as Meredith calls them!

3. The girls had people stopping them to take their pictures. I bet they posed for over 20 pictures today! Families would rush up to them and have their son stand next to them. One group took turns with everybody getting pictures of the “blondes”. Older women would rub their faces. Our guide saw that I was upset by people touching their faces and she told me that this was a good sign; that it means they think the children are beautiful and the children have “good luck”. I don’t know how many people rubbed their hair! Our guide said that many people make a pilgrimage to the Forbidden City and that for many people, this is their first time to go further than 50 miles from their home and that they probably have never seen foreigners except in movies. She said they touch the hair to see if it is real and to see if it is soft. Our group was laughing at all the attention our girls were receiving. Schea, if our kids were together, I think we would have stopped traffic and trumped the Forbidden City for attention! (Her children have blond hair and amazing blue eyes!) At the end of the day, people in our own group were taking pictures of the girls so they could tell the story about the “blond sisters”.

Tomorrow is our last day to wake up and be just a family of four! Monday we will become the Fearless Five! We are claiming this promise that… “LOVE CASTS OUT ALL FEAR”. Please join us in praying this for Elaine as she has such a life change ahead of her.

Again, tired but happy! The Goff Gang

Oh yeah, if you have Mike or Angie’s email and have questions, please email! We check it twice a day. We would love a friendly note!