Our recent trip to Beijing was quite an adventure! We decided we’d like to visit the country where our adopted daughter will be from, and Pamela was able to find us a great deal on the trip. We decided a tour would be best for our first trip there, which turned out to be a good decision. Very few Chinese speak English (although many people are learning in preparation for the Olympics in 2008) and there were a number of tourist traps waiting for us.
The trip is a long one—two hours to San Francisco and then 12 hours to Beijing. The first place of business we saw was a Starbucks in the Beijing Airport. (A Seattle landmark halfway around the world!) Right next to it was a KFC.
The city is huge. Almost 15 million people live there. The city is in the midst of a staggering building boom, and a seemingly mad rush to modernize and westernize. They are determined to make a very positive impression during the Olympics next year. The amount of construction still to go is tremendous, but as our tour guide kept saying, “It will be finished.” It was her way of telling us that the Chinese government will do whatever it takes and they have the control to do it.
One example of an incomplete, but very striking, structure is the Olympic Stadium they call the Birds Nest. 
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