Hello from Beijing!

I’m clearly having problems with the time difference because I woke up at midnight and I was ready to go.  Willie has no problems with it though.  It’s 5:40 am right now and he’s sound asleep.  I was praying not to get out of bed before 5AM and that was hard.

We arrived yesterday morning at 3:30 am.  Our flight was an hour and half early which was great.  Willie was ready to get off the plane.  I don’t know if he could have taken the full time.  It took us a long time to get our baggage event though the airport was empty.  We made it to our hotel but couldn’t check in because it was 6 AM.  Luckily, we already set up our cooking class.

Untitled
This is our first official picture in Beijing! Doesn’t my husband look handsome? Hands off ladies, he’s mine!

China day 1

We had a lot of time to kill before the class so we kind of just hung around at the school with another fellow marathoner Gilda! She’s from Mexico City and she’s running her first marathon. This is her eating some banana leaf thing filled with rice and dates. We didn’t have any but she said it tasted like oatmeal. Our teacher told us there wasn’t much flavor to it though.

Untitled

Our cooking class was how to make dumplings! Willie was super excited to learn this. Everyone in the group made their own batch and we all shared. We had steamed, boiled and pan fried dumplings. I made the Chinese cabbage and mushroom dumpling and Willie made fennel with pork. I was just having a great time because Willie was having a good time.

image

He was showing everyone up with his superb knife skills.

Untitled
Dumpling making is pretty hard stuff. Ok, it wasn’t hard but there are a lot of steps that go into making these things. Especially when you think about how quickly you eat them. I was so happy to be finished making them so we could cook them up.

Untitled
We all shared the prize at the end.

Today we have marathon meetings to tend to because tomorrow we’ll be running the marathon on the Great Wall. The nervousness has worn off and the excitement has set in.

Don’t forget to follow my instagram and Flickr. Facebook and Twitter don’t work over here. Although when I post to instagram the posts do show to Facebook because it was previously set up there. I just can’t check FB or twitter.

I’ll try to keep the posts coming. I hope everyone had a great day. We’re about to start our Wednesday!