Anyway, today was a day of tours with the adoption agency. We all got on a bus at 8am and headed for the Great Wall. It was amazing, but very, very crowded. Honestly, the first half of the walk was just wall to wall people. Luckily, our family is in decent shape, so we could climb past the crowds to get to the less crowded places. The stairs are steep and uneven and worn from years and years of walking. It’s neat to step on stone stairs that are worn down from use. There is not a lot to see (It is, after all, a WALL), but it is big and impressive because of its age and vast size (more than, say, high quality or details in construction). So, most of the morning, for me, was spent counting my kids heads and fighting with Bill.
Let me just say before I go into this that my husband is a marvelous man with many, many wonderful, endearing qualities. However, there are situations in which he just loses his head and has undeniable blind spots. For example, I’ve written about “The Travelling A” before (see The Wife Olympics from November 2010). He also hits what I call “Speed Mode.” Whenever there is both empty space before him and an opportunity to move forward, he forgets everything else and just zooms off like a bumble bee headed for God knows what. Bill certainly doesn’t know. He just becomes possessed with a desire to move forward quickly and he CAN NOT be stopped. To make matters worse, his idea of waiting is to remain still until the slower faction is within about a ten feet radius and then zoom off again, yelling behind his back, “What? I waited!” while we finally sit down to rest. This would be fine, if he only would acknowledge it and stop convincing himself that “daddy running off” is somehow a form of family bonding.
The result on this day was that Bill zoomed off with our two teenage boys (aged 14 and 15), leaving me fighting the crowds while herding Reilly and Sharon (aged 9 and 12) who kept on trudging along at their 9 year old girl pace, watching their father get smaller and smaller with the distance and asking why daddy didn’t wait for them. How does one answer this?
In the section that we were walking, the Great Wall is about twenty feet off the ground with high sides, like you see in the pictures, and steps that vary in height from three inches to about eighteen inches. On the steep parts, poor Sharon was practically climbing. There are square, stone houses about 1/8 of a mile apart all along the wall and 80% of the crowd was just walking to the first stone house and turning around. Just past this first house, I finally yelled loudly enough for Bill to catch on that his life was in danger. He stopped and when we finally caught up to him he looked at me like I was a corrupt race official and asked what the problem was? Rather than explain it, I just nodded to Paul and Matt, who actually had some idea about what was going on, and declared that Daddy was going to walk with Sharon and Reilly now and Mommy was going to go ahead with the boys. We zoomed off together before Bill could get two words out.
I have to say, this was really fun. On occasions like this, Daddy is the safe parent, so Reilly and Sharon were more than happy to be with Bill and I was free to run off. The boys and I are more evenly matched speed wise so we hung together and I had a really nice time glancing back and watching Bill patiently herding the girls up the stairs. Of course, we waited for them at each of the stone houses and zoomed off toward the next one once Daddy reached the required ten foot radius. This was purposeful, deliberate revenge on my part and I fully stand behind all my actions on this occasion. I’d say it was a highlight of the trip for me.
After a while, the girls had enough climbing so we stopped, took a family picture and then Bill and I debated who was going to go ahead with the boys and who would go back with the girls. While we were discussing this (as well as Bill’s completely unjustified comment about throwing me over the wall), the kids went off into a corner and came back declaring that Daddy was going ahead and I was going back. Reilly had flipped a coin and it was decided, best out of three.
A few other dads from our tour group had caught up to us and asked if they could join Bill and the boys. Matt, who demonstrated a remarkable amount of situational awareness actually waited for them to gather their things while Bill zoomed off with Paul. Matt looked at me and asked, “Why doesn’t he just wait?” I told Matt it was a birth defect and that I was proud of him for overcoming his gene pool and waiting for the group.
We gathered back at the bus and then drove to a restaurant where we had lunch, a short sales pitch at a jade factory and then we headed back to Beijing for Tiananmen square and the Forbidden City. Like the first section of the Great Wall, these were so crowded, it was impossible to do anything more than simply count children. We both went into Protection Mode. Luckily, Bill was back to his wonderful, normal self and stayed behind the group the entire time. I don’t think he lost sight of any of us even once.
Rather than go back to the room with the tour, Bill suggested we go to a few temples/parks that he had found on his morning runs. The kids weren’t too happy about this, but man, it was lovely. There are a few huge lakes in the middle of the city and they have done a tremendous job with landscaping around them. There were these really cool round boats you could rent (almost like the huge inner tubes you ride at amusement parks) with tent like roofs and tables in the middle for snacks or cards that seemed to be just floating along. There was a beautiful columned walkway all along the edge of the lake and temples and benches everywhere.
Unfortunately, the subway was much farther off than we realized and we didn’t get back to the hotel until sunset. We all collapsed for a while and then Bill left and came back with McDonalds for all of us. This is what I mean about Bill’s wonderful, normal self. What other husband would even KNOW about those parks, let alone revel in walking through them with the kids, get us back to the hotel through a foreign subway system and then, after a morning run and another ten hours of walking, run and get us dinner? I would have easily let my kids starve until morning without hesitation or remorse.
So, that was pretty much our day. We spent most of it counting our children’s heads –that, and watching them get their pictures taken with complete strangers. We tried to make a game out of this and give the kids a quarter for each photo op, but there were so many, we eventually lost track. I’ll never understand what is up with that, but let me just say, despite what Obama thinks, American’s are pretty darn popular.
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