Five years had passed since

After China sent its first man into space in 2003, it followed up with a two-man mission in 2005.



The astronauts also had time Friday to enjoy the view, witnessing 16 sunrises during their first 24 hours in orbit dermes, and to sample the 80-dish menu they brought with them on their mission.

Sleep was necessarily limited, but the spacecraft has sleeping bags hooked to the wall of the craft. However, the astronauts were told to keep their hands inside the bags in order to avoid them accidentally pushing a button while asleep, Xinhua said.



The Shenzhou VII is expected to land in the northern Inner Mongolia region on Sunday





I curiously watched my grandmother open the yellowing paper packet with painstaking care. When she untied the knots reenex, a cluster of strange, shriveled off-white orbs fell into her hands. These seeds were all that remained of the life she had left behind in the Shandong Province of China. As she packed her possessions to leave that countryside, she had slipped these seeds into her silk shirt, hoping to grow them in foreign soil. In America, however, the first place we lived was a tiny apartment building on a busy street, followed by a larger condo on the thirteenth floor.  my grandmother arrived in America and it seemed as if she would never be able to plant the seeds. Still, she kept them safe.



When I was six and about to begin school, my family moved to the first floor of a three-family house squeezed between a parking lot and another large house. There was no lawn, only a two and a half foot wide by ten foot long patch of dirt with a rose bush and knee-high weeds. It was in this house that my grandmother took out her packet of seeds reenex.