Traveling with Joy

That's the person not the emotion. PS That picture is the non-steep part of the Great Wall, not the super hero part that I did. (Please reference the "official" China blog. The link is on my facebook page. And for extra bonus points you can try to guess the words that Andy gave me to work into those blog posts....most of them are fairly obvious.)

China has been interesting and traveling with Joy to China has been even more interesting. So first off Joy took a medicine to help with her flight anxiety....with a glass of wine. (hey, free booze on the flight to Beijing, can't pass that up. tranquilizer or no tranquilizer). Anyway, she pretty much lost 14 hours of her life. However, I did not realize this. She was completely functional for about 5 hours of that...though slightly angry. She does not remember ANY of this. There was about a half hour conversation that we had, dinner, and some excellent chocolates that she does recall. But she doesn't remember getting stuff out of the overhead bin, eating the carrots out of my inflight meal, complaing loudly about the rude people standing in front of us, stretching her legs in a swimming scissor kick type motion or the entire drive from the airport to the hotel. The other extremely funny part was when she was reading something and fell asleep for about 1 second. Long enough to drop the paper. She then immediately woke up and said "what just happened?" HILARIOUS.

So then today, we went to the Great Wall, and Joy was like a celebrity. There were little Chinese people pointing and taking pictures of/with her. (I even got in a picture with her and a Chinese person too...I could be in some person's scrapbook someday). Apparently, in the touristy places there are more people from rural China who haven't seen an African American before. And only if I had red hair, it would've been a dynamic duo. Luckily Joy took it all in stride. We've also created our own theme for the trip complete with hand gestures: One world. One dream. (It was on a big sign by the Great Wall and we liked it/liked to make fun of it, so we stole it. I'm not really sure what the one dream is yet, though.)