The Great Wall

Before I start talking about the Great Wall, I'd just like to say, there's only one way to follow up a night like Thursdays...it involves going to Hooters for dinner, then a club named 'Sex in Da City' and watching pole dancers with your male coworkers. :P

 

The most obvious of things to do when one visits China is to see the Great Wall. And that's exactly what I did this weekend.We were able to arrange for a driver through someone at work, so Saturday morning myself and 3 of the guys met up to head out to Mutianyu, one of the sections open to tourists. We all hopped in to an old VW Passat and headed out. It was a pretty tight fit, but apparently the guy arranging this for some reason didn't know I was coming. Apparently the guy wasn't expecting all of us either, because a few minutes after we got out of the city, he pulled over at a gas station and started looking at one of the tires.

 

Now, this is something that would never happen in the US...the gas station guys came over, they talked to the driver, and then right away jacked the car up, pulled the tire off and wheeled it off to the garage to fix it. We stood around and watched, amazed at how quickly it was getting done - and the driver hadn't even filled out any paper work yet! It turned out that his car really couldn't carry all of us. He called someone and was able to arrange for a van to come pick us up at the gas station. We hung out, had some snacks and were on our way after less than an hour.

 

The ride out to the Wall was interesting enough. Our new driver was some kind of cross between a Nascar driver and a New York taxi driver. I'm not sure if the far righthand lane in China is strictly a breakdown lane, but he had no qualms about driving in it. Or in the lane going the other direction. Even in the narrow, winding roads as we got up the mountain. We were all pretty scared at times!

 

Once we were up there, we bought our tickets and hopped on a chairlift to take us up to the wall. I'm not sure if there were walkways or stairs to get up there, but it would have been a long walk, and we probably wouldn't have had any energy to walk on the wall. The views from up top were pretty amazing, but we had some pretty crappy weather. I'm not sure how much of it was clouds, and how much was smog, so you couldn't see as far as you might on a really clear day. We walked along the wall for a bit, taking pictures and taking in the view. The wall itself is pretty cool. The ground was often unlevel, the stairs were steep and crooked, but everything was in pretty good condition. We could see further along the wall, and there were parts that were falling down and in very bad condition.

 

For the way down, we hopped on some 'toboggins' and slide down a giant luge. It was pretty fun, although you couldn't go too fast without getting yelled at! We did a little shopping at the bottom (I bought a shirt that says 'I climbed the Great Wall') and headed back to Beijing.

 

And that's about it for my trip to Beijing. Sunday was spent seeing the Temple of Heaven, and then a little more shopping at the Pearl Market. I'm off to Guangzhou tomorrow, which sounds like it's going to be a pretty quiet trip. Not just because the office is closed for 3 of the days we're there, but because there doesn't seem to be much to do there. Well, hopefully it will be a relaxing end to my travels for now!