It was a little shorter than I imagined it. I always thought of a wall that is 35 or 45 feet (or should I say 10.67 or 13.72 meters) high, you know, more like a sky scaper when you look at it. The wall is a little smaller than that though. I guess it ranges from 15 to 30 feet high. The height is not what is impressive though, it is the area on which it is built, and the length of the wall. The wall is built on the ridge of the mountains. Sitting up there, you can't but wonder how the large amounts of stone were halled up the mountain to build the hundreds of miles of wall. The answer is forced labor, and the story of building the wall is not pretty in any respect, but even so, just imagining the amount of work that went into the wall, you can not help but be impressed.
We drove only 30 or 45 minutes to get to the wall from where we are staying. The wall is really pretty close to where we are. I don't know where we got onto the wall, but it was somewhere close. When we got on the wall, we could walk a little ways. The left (which everyone seemed to be walking) took up up the mountainside. You can walk a good distance up the mountain, but you could not go to the top because there was some repair work being done on the wall.
Walking around on the wall was not that bad. There are steps about half of the time, and they are uneven. You have big steps, and then little steps, all mixed together. So, you just have to pay attention to where you are walking. The up and down of the wall was not that bad just going along the relatively flat ridgeline, but when we started going up, the pain started. I don't know what the altitude change was, but at the end of our climb (really halfway, becuse we had to go back after we reached "the end") there was steps forever, just going up. Now, I started running up the steps, two at a time, that quickly gave way to running up one step at a time, which gave way to walking slowly up, one step at a time. It was pretty harsh on our legs. We though we were conditioned for walking in Taipei, but that was nothing to the stairs on the wall. Anway, after that, we went to lunch.
Lunch was nothing really exciting, just some rice, jelly things, and some fried corn. The corn was interesting, it was really pretty weird. The corn was fried, so it was crunchy, but it was also off the cob, i.e. not the hard kernals. Anyway, you eat something new here eveyday.
We went into Beijing today, just drove around a little. We saw the Bird's Nest from the highway. We did not have enough time to go in. You have to pay now, in order to get into the Olympic area. That is annoying, but it is a tourist attraction, and the government might as well charge I guess. Anyway, we went to take a quick look at the Beijing University. I guess it is the most famous univeristy in all of China, anyway, that had a nice campus.
After that, we went to a restaurant for dinner, in celebration of Katherine's birthday. It was a pretty fancy place, they had a show on a little stage. The show had a Chinese music group (it had 2 Chinese harps, 2 Erhu, and 2 Pipa in it), dancers, opera singers (Chinese opera is funny to listen to for a little bit, but it gets old and annoyinng really fast...), Kung Fu demonstrations, and a tea pourer person (sounds not so interesting, but this guy was really cool).
So, that was good. I don't know what we are going to do tomorrow. For the entirety of next week (not Sunday, the Chinese week starts on Monday) there is a national holiday. So, I guess pretty much everyone will be not working...I don't know how that works, but anyway, that's what's happening.
-Aaron
Pretty much the first photo we took. We didn't fake this one. Not that we have faked any...
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| From Great Wall |
There were some amazing landscape views... It was very serene up there.
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| From Great Wall |
What we walked. We did not walk to where the wall disapears. About halfway through it takes a sharp corner and starts going up the mountain, it then take another turn and heads to the left and out of sight. Well, on that first turn, we walked about halfway up that, as far as we could go.
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| From Great Wall |
My parents! Sorry the picture is framed crooked, I haven't fixed it yet.
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| From Great Wall |
Birthday Girl!
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| From Great Wall |
You know who that is...
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| From Great Wall |
Stairs, lots and lots of stairs. Yes, we climbed all the way to where the wall leaves the photo.
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| From Great Wall |
A shot looking down from the top, and back. We can from where it looks like the wall dissapears. If you zoom in we started from the red flags way in the distance.
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| From Great Wall |
I had to throw this in. Here is the "breaking balloon through glass with needle" demonstration. Yes, that is me holding the glass, and yes, the balloon did break when the guy threw the needle.
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| From Great Wall |
The tea pourer. So, he poured tea from the long pot in all sorts of ways, it was pretty cool. There are a two more on the album, just click the link at the end of any photo.
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| From Great Wall |
3 comments:
Sooo...how did you get up on stage? Did they come and pick you or did you volunteer? And how did they communicate with you? =)
-How did you like your birthday dinner Katherine?
That wall is just amazing. I had no idea it had all those steps. Incredible.
The tea pourer looks interesting. I would have probably liked that better than the opera, too. How did the balloon pop when the needle hit the glass? Is it a 'magic' trick? I'm not familiar with that one, not that I'm familiar with a bunch of magic tricks . . .
And what did you mean by the caption under the picture of your family on the wall? We didn't fake this one?
I feel like I should know this one, because your post made it sound as though everyone knows it, but I have to ask. What is the Bird's Nest?
The "we didn't fake this one" was an abstact reference to one of my posts where I commented on how tourists travel thousands of miles to take pictures infront of random stuff that is not from the place they are visiting. I think I was talking about a picture we had taken in a buidling infront of a wall....I think I said "this could have been taken in our living room."
The Birds Nest is the Olympic stadium which China built. The opening cerimonies were held there, as well as many other events. You can google it to see some good pictures. Google can be used for about everything.... :)
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