Arrgggh! I wrote this whole thing and then lost it. It does auto save, but doggone it, it saved right after I lost it. Don't what button I pushed on this crazy laptop, but blip! It was gone! So you may not get the meat out of this one, but I'll try again.
I am posting some aerial pictures both of us took while flying across Alaska and the Eastern European/Asian continent. Very cool for us. One picture that is part land, part water is over Russia. I especially love the rivers, like veins racing across the land, sometimes dark bluish and sometime brown. But when you get around Alaska they are silver from the ice. Very cool. I love the clouds too, fiels of fluffy marshmellows at times. Anna Lin said she would love to run across the clouds. Me too sweetie! If we were like the Monkey King we could bounced on and throughout them, even riding as a skateboard. :-) The pictures are when we are almost leaving Alaska since I could not get to the window for the line of sight seers waiting for a view. We were second to the last row of seats on the plane, so is was here we got our view.
We were lucky to sit by a motley crew of people. Sitting in our fourth seat in our section was a young radiologist from China, who I really thought was a student. Poor guy, he looked so young. He was probably getting frustrated with me, but couldn't speak as well as some others. In front of us were some girls who he talked with. We got a chance to chat with them on the 'second' round of flying out of Chicago before boarding our plane. Anna Lin was enchanted by the girls, all lovely young and educated. She even took out her pony-tail to have her hair down long like one of the girls. One lady was a PhD student in Educational Research. We talked the most and her English was excellent. It was through her that I realized the young man was a doctor not a student. We chatted for a good while once about children's literature with her seat-mate who was from the states doing a study abroad. In China they do not read for personal pleasure when they are young because they are studying to pass exams to get into schools and such. (They do try to read a lot while learning English, but she has mainly read like American Literature stuff.) Education is very important there. It makes sense. You have towns that are considered small, which have 4 millions people. In order to get good jobs you have to be well educationed and have an edge other others. Learning English is one of the best ways to do this. I cannot imagine competing with so many for a job. It is mind-blowing. They were amazed, and have been others that Anna Lin can speak so well in English after almost 2 years with us. The orphanage staff, and our guides, were also blown away from this. The children's ed program director said he would work hard to put more children up for the international adoption. He said 30 kids have been adopted by U.S. families. I think he saw in Anna Lin where Autumn would be in two years and was a amazed. Of course all kids are different, but Autumn said, or repeated her first English words yesterday with meaning. Repeating to just repeat is one thing, but repeating with understanding is another. I was pointing out they each had their own pinky bears. "Anna Lin's pinky bear." "Jin Qiu's pinky bear." (We are slowly introducing Autumn to her name, mainly by letting Anna Lin call her that. We'll start more soon, just wanted her to get use to us." Anyway, after I said the second statement she said, "Jin Qiu's pinky bear" and nodded her head, then repeated it. Wow! What a kid!
Boy, I really got off the subject of my aerial views. But those who know would be disappointed if I actually stayed on track. :-)
By the way, the last picture was taken inside the plane by Ric himself. It was taken over part of Russia by the Sea of Okhotsk (Google it). Now figure out our flight path from Chicago. Just had to include it. :-D
-Angi
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