Beijing Part Two: Feeling small

  

Sun setting during Beijing rush hour

Using trains is a much more traditional and surprisingly still an easier mode of transport within China. Obviously our high speed train is a new twist on tradition, but we we will just blame our need to get to Beijing faster on the kids. :) Aside from attempting to balance myself through the use of a squatty potty at almost 200 miles an hour, it was great!

Thursday morning we woke up, had our amazing breakfast, and we started walking towards a shopping area I saw marked on my map. We walked along the very busy 3rd Ring Rd. (These are very common here. Kinda like a 465, but with sidewalks, main roads, named Ring Roads emcompass cities. As the cities grow, they have more rings. Beijing now has five I think. From what we saw from the train, they might be working on 6th Ring Road.) We took the pedestrian overpass and took the first street west and suddenly the scenery changed.

Crossing the street from above is preferred to playing dodgeball with traffic back in Wuhan.

Now the streets were extremely narrow.
Quiet.
Tree lined.
Lush with vegetation.
Well maintained.
High walled.
Police officers standing at attention.
And was that barbed wire at the top of the fences?
We continued slowly and to my right I saw the gold seal along the wall "Embassy of Libya." Whoa. The boys and I continued walking along. To one side was the back sides of other embassies, on the other was one embassy after another. Kazakhstan. Serbia. Iran. I felt like a very small dot in a very big world.

That is the thing about being overseas, I think. It makes you think about how small you are. I am not just one person walking down a street in a city of 25 million. I am one person in a country of 1.35 billion. In a world of who knows how many billion. And then there are all these other countries that I have never thought about. Or heard of.  For the record, being overseas also makes you think repeatedly, "Don't let that idiot President do anything to piss anyone off until I get home" but I digress...

I realized how small the world was at that moment because there were all these official buildings representing people I would never know and yet I knew I have a whole world of my own standing behind me that would never see this place. It was quite a moment, I tell you! We kept on walking.

And then there it was.  A piece of my heart not in living flesh, but represented in just a single blue and yellow flag hanging from a modest pole in the middle of a courtyard. There was the Ukrainian Embassy. Boy, did I lose it.

Thinking of how much I missed Mariya was enough to make me cry for a big ole long time. And that was a good thing because we had a big ole walk ahead of us. Hudson and Tucker were real troopers though. We were a bit shock and awed to see the uniformed soldiers marching the area. We continued to see the names of countries far and wide: Somalia, Argentina, Turkey, Cambodia. 

Soon we found our expat/international supermarket and found our comfort snacks, did our happy dance, and were back in business. We spent a lovely afternoon walking around a gorgeous outdoor shopping mall enjoying the sights and smells. The mall was fantastic, but way beyond my spending habits. The boys and I enjoyed a couple hours reading books in a well-lit window of a fantastic bookstore where they accepted my American credit card (Holla! First time!) and walked the 1.5 miles back feeling renewed.

On Friday our main objective was to get our marriage certificate validated at the Embassy and do some touring. The U.S. Embassy is the opposite direction of the previous day's embassy walk. It sits on a guarded road next to the Republic of Korea Embassy.

Fortress surrounding Korean Embassy

Our passports gained us access to a gated street where we waited for our bilingual lawyer/girl to assist us. Standing outside the United States Embassy made me feel safe and proud. Only when we went around to the Visa entrance did I feel like I was in China again. Throngs of people were in long lines hoping to get their visas to come to the U.S.

Our work was quick and painless, but expensive. And so we left to begin our day touring the capital of China. Leaving the fortress, I took probably one of my favorite pictures of the trip. Notice (in the background of this picture) that I was told QUICKLY to not have my camera out.

Mr. T with machine gun-armed guards outside the Korean Embassy.

Tucker sized shack/store.

On this day we visited Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, and the Pearl Market. Probably each of those are worthy of a return trip and a blog of their own, but I don't think I have that kind of time. It is still four days since we got home and I am still doing our laundry. 

Sure, I will pose with you.

Is your kid obsessed with dinosaurs? Mine want a pet dragon.