Snow, snow, and more snow!

For those of you that know our itinerary you would expect that we are sitting in our hotel room in Taiyuan City preparing to meet our daughter tomorrow.  Well, you'd be wrong.  We are instead sitting in our hotel room in Beijing riding out one of the worst snow storms in memory for Beijing.  It has shut down the airport for today and also they say tomorrow.  Sooooo, instead of flying out tonight, instead we will take the high speed train tomorrow morning.  We will awake at 5am and be at the train station for the 7:30am train which will get us to Taiyuan City in plenty of time to get our daughter.  We will have very little if any time to get to the hotel and prepare and it is certainly possible that we will get her on the way to the hotel.  The train takes 3 hours, so not bad and quite honestly it will give us a good view of the countryside.  That's the quick and dirty, so know I will talk about our day.  We started out by heading down to breakfast knowing that our cyber friends Peggy, Patrick, and their beautiful daughter queen Lilly McCole had arrived that night and may be at breakfast already.  Sure enough they were and we went to introduce ourselves.  There was also one more couple there with a little daughter too, but we weren't sure who they were and did not introduce ourselves.  Little did we know that couple would come into our lives a bit later in the day.  So, it was snowing at a pretty good clip and on the schedule today was a trip to the forbidden city and then on to the airport.  We talked with our friends the McColes and decide that despite the weather we were going to give the forbidden city a shot.  So at noon we were checked out and waiting for our guide to come and get us.  So off we went, with our guide Reagan explaining how rare this snow is and that she was actually very excited to go because it is very rare to see the forbidden city with snow like this.  She said in her near 25 yrs she has never seen it like this.  I needed no prodding and was super geeked to check it out.  We were all a little nervous about how queen Lilly would do, but to her credit she did amazing.  The forbidden city has a magic about it as soon as you walk thru the entrance, but when you see it covered in new white snow it was even more amazing.  Clearly though, the emperor who commissioned it was not thinking "snow" when he built the walkways and stairs out of polished marble.  This was evident by how many found themselves on their rear ends as we strolled thru the grounds.  We were all very careful and made it safely about 1/3 the way thru before we decide that we should get to the airport.  I could write forever about the forbidden city and how it was built before our country was even discovered, but I shall spare you all.  Suffice to say, it is magnificent, majestic, and overwhelming.  If it is not on your bucket list, add it and add it near the top.  I will have to say the same about the great wall too.  So onward to the airport we went with the McColes.  It took us a long time to get there as traffic was very slow and our driver even had to stop at one point to get the ice off the wipers.  Clearly he did not know the trick of rolling down your window and reaching out and timing the wiper stroke so you can grab it and lift it and let it snap back down thus freeing itself from the ice.  It is important to note that while this was only about 6 inches of snow, Beijing has no significant plowing capability, so it just builds up on the road into a big pile of slushy mess.  It does not however stop people from riding mopeds and bicycles.  So we get to the airport and our guide Reagan goes to check on our flights.  Of course we are all now thawed out from the forbidden city and queen Lilly has fallen asleep in her parents arms.  It took a while but our guide came back with the news that flights were no longer running and that the guide company was looking at alternate transport for us.  It wasn't long after that we learned we would be taking a train.  For us it is only 3 hours by high speed rail.  For the McColes it was 10 hours and probably overnight.  Unhappy!  However, in true McCole fashion they brushed it off as no biggie.  We also are just fine with this as the train is an opportunity to see more of China.  It is at this point that our lives have crossed with the other couple that was at breakfast.  They are from Norway and are also adopting out of Shanxi province and will pick their child up in Taiyuan too.  So we will part company with McColes tomorrow and then meet again in Guangzhou.  So, there you have it.  We are going to have an early dinner and then an early bedtime and be up and rolling tomorrow early.  This is very crazy, but strangely not stressful, probably because our guide has handled this soooooooo well.   Enjoy a few pics from the forbidden city under a rare blanket of snow, it was truly stunning.  Next time we post, we hope to either have our daughter or be on our way out the door to meet her.