Chinese Xenophobia vs Racially Mixed Kids

We are having lots of fun on our trip but it's hard work. The kids are having trouble getting used to the time zones as we fly through them at jet speed. A 12 hour stop at the Beijing airport was spent eating at restaurents, showering/"resting" in an hourly hotel-like room and playing the "who can kick their shoe further/higher" game. All of us were a bit of a circus attraction walking around in a culture that is 95% mono-ethnic chinese. An older lady reached out and touched Nick today which scared him a bit but the main attraction is Sophie. She's the cutest and the one that laughs the most. That being said, I received a ton of weird looks walking around the airport alone but I think it was mostly because I was in sandals and shorts in the middle of winter than the fact that I'm white. Sophie sleeps when she wants, where she wants and will be the last to get used to the time change. The Chinese people seem to lack people skills. More than once I got the impression from people that the fact we didn't speak Mandarin made us a burden to deal with (which we were). Sometimes we could overcome the xenophobia because we had racialy hybrid kids like when we had lunch in the Beijing airport and they seated us near the cooking area so that all 5+ servers could just stand and watch us when they weren't serving other people. I don't think I've ever had such a high level of service in my life. Now that we are in Bangkok, we are feeling much more welcome. The communication barriers are still there but there's a reason they call this the land of smiling faces as their body language is much more welcoming. Today we whent into town to see the Royal Grounds. It involved taking an airport shuttle, a high-speed sky train and a crazy cab. The grounds were filled with temples, statues, monuments and tons of people. The kids were exhausted and the high of waking up in a strange land wore off by the time we walked through the front gate. The heat, exaustion and crowds chased us from the palace after only a 2 dozen pictures of half of the grounds. We then took a walk to the river thinking a boat tour would be a good way to cool off. Unfortunately the walk felt more like a marathon and the waves looked a but too rocky for us. Instead we walked through alleyways and started buying food from street vendors. The fact that we could do this in the shade away from the crowds of tourists and it involved one of our favorite activities, eating, made it the highlight of the outing. The kids loved the grilled chicken on a stick and I got smiles for ordering the catfish. Other foods included noodle soups, papaya salad and freshly sliced mangoes. Finding a cab back to the train station was easy but finding a washroom was impossible. It was only thanks to a sympathetic 7-11 worker that we were able to get the access to a toilet the kids so deperately needed. Juliette is at the age now where she wants to prove she's better than everyone else by passing comments like "Why are people in California wearing winter clothes when it's not even cold?" or "This place smells bad" when visiting the street vendors of Bangkok. Hopefully if we can teach these kids anything during the trip is that there are all types of people and cultures in the world and just because we do things a certain way doesn't make us better than them. Right now we're just chilling at our hotel, getting used to the time zone and soaking in the AC. Tomorrow we're off to Cambodia to start our "rockstar" cross country tour to see the sites and more importantly see the family we never knew we had.