Chinese Water Torture

Or some kind of torture at least.

Neehow from Beijing, where Brian and I are managing to both enjoy ourselves and navigate around the city while at the same time become totally overwhelmed and stressed about figuring out how to fit in all we want to see before our flight out of Hong Kong. We thought that we'd made things easier when we cut the whole eastern and southern seaboard and decided to focus on the Yunnan and Gansu provinces after a week or two of Beijing to Xi'an (with stops in between). But it takes so long to get anywhere that the days are running out faster than we can believe. And we're spending so much time trying to figure out the planning and buy train tickets, etc., it makes it hard to find time to be a tourist here and see things like the Forbidden City, etc.

I'm sure we'll figure it out though; we always seem to. We'll just have to drop a place or two that we had really wanted to see. :-( Meanwhile, we've had some great food here in Beijing, both from the street snack carts and a nice restaurant and we've got the subway system down pat. We even squeezed in a trip to the US embassy to get new pages added to our passport as we were about out. (Which is impressive considering the passports were brand new before the trip!).

Add a couple of the random kindness/conversations we have with folks on the street and things in general are going quite well here in China. (Now if we could only figure out how to teleport ourselves between cities, all would be perfect).

Becca