The Great Wall

Chinese people have a saying "He who has not been to the Great Wall is not a great man." I'm guessing these days this includes women too... so I'm happy to report I am now great. Or, at least a little better than I was last week.

Some quick facts about the Great Wall... It's about 500 years old, that is, the Wall as we know it. Various versions were built thousands of years ago, but the structure that we're used to seeing is more recent. It is not one continuous wall either... it's several different sections that stretch from the Yellow Sea on the East across the northern border. It was meant to keep out the Mongolians.

The mountain the Wall is built on is extremely steep... It seems like the mountains alone would have been enough to keep out intruders. But the Wall is impressive and snakes across the tops of the ridges.

This time of year, there isn't much color on the mountains, so things looked a little bit grey. But a few cherry blossoms were starting to show and I'm one shade darker than white now for having been in the sun for the afternoon.

Easily the best part of the Wall.... the toboggan you can ride back down the bottom. Not entirely a Chinese cultural experience, but still amazingly fun.

And on the way home, we got a quick trip to see the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium. It's not used for anything these days, but it still looks pretty cool.

Anything on a Stick

One of the stops we made in Beijing was to the Night Market that opens around 6:00 each night. This is the place to be if you're an adventurous eater.

Basically, anything you can imagine is put onto a stick and cooked for you. They have your every day meats like beef, chicken, or lamb. But they branch out a lot further too.... a lot further.

Among the many skewers we saw were snake, squid, eel, whole birds (head included), beetles, scorpions, and sea horses.

I decided that my experience of the Night Market would not extend beyond taking pictures, but Gary was up for trying some of it. He went with a grasshopper-ish insect. They fried it up and drizzled a spicy sauce on it.

His verdict... "Doesn't really take like much of anything. Just crispy."

Beijing Sites

Last weekend, Gary and I took the bullet train from Tianjin to Beijing. It's just under 100 miles away, but the train got us there in only 30 minutes. There's so much to see in Beijing, so we decided to just stick to one area this time and see the major tourist attractions.

First up, the Forbidden City. The "City" is a huge expanse of various royal buildings where the emperor and empress would have stayed... some structures were for housing, some for political meetings, some for resting and entertainment. And while the buildings are beautiful and the intricate decorations are impressive, the actual sites to see are underwhelming. What we actually toured was just a series of large open plazas, surrounded by the newly-renovated ancient buildings, none of which we could actually enter.

Highlights included the huge red doors with golden knobs you are meant to rub for good luck, and finding out that even though the palace walls stretch only half a mile from North to South, the emperor had a "resting" room in the middle. The lazy old man...

So after a few hours of making our way around the palace grounds, we headed to Tiananmen Square. Let me start by saying any and all references to Tiananmen Square's moment in history are completely blocked from the Chinese internet. Most Chinese people know it as nothing other the location of several gigantic political buildings and museums. There are security cameras and guards everywhere, and you get the overwhelming sense that you shouldn't talk about anything too scandalous while you're nearby.

So, we just quickly saw some of the enormous shrines to Chairman Mao Zedong and moved on. Everything we would have seen, heard, or read would have been carefully constructed anyway.