China 2007

The glory of this place is in its unexpectedness. The monuments themselves are nothing to gasp at, but the stark reality of their existance, and how much they mean to the common people, is pleasing. And of course, everything seems impossible, fake, Disney. It feels like it's put there for us to stare at, walk on, just absorb. While in reality, it's just a wall... a pile of stones, that goes on for a while. The blazing sun, never leaving us to mope at its absence, makes everything seem a bit more dreamy. But in general, it's nothing like the colorful pictures we see. The one thing I hope - that my painstaking effort in taking an HD camera up to the top of the Great Wall in loafers and long pants will pay off on the big screen.

I was up with the sun. In Beijing, that's way before 5. We had a whole new city to explore, Beijing from the perspective of ancient history... no longer the glory of Chairman Mao and Tian'anmen Square, but the splendor of the Ming dynasty. We grow accustomed to bargaining, transportation and adjust our composure in this foreign atmosphere with a rapid pace. Our morning adventure was one of the seven manmade wonders of the world, and we were lucky to explore a section that was largely unpopulated because of its distance from the few hundred square-kilometers of 'downtown' Beijing. We spent more than an hour driving through windy country roads, mountains narrowing in to a rocky ridge ascending a few thousand feet into a sky that was rapidly becoming blue and clear. Wild horses roamed through the brilliantly green fields, and other packs of animals were herded by shepards as we sped through the dozens of kilometers of countryside. Fields were often broken up by rogue trees, however, and the shade made it appear cool outside. But no, it was far from cool, and the heat seemed to rise into the mountains. The wall stretched on up and down for a few miles; every other watchtower was accessible on multiple levels. The wall finally turned steeply upwards, presenting a menacing 500 steps. In this short stretch of wall, we must have climbed at least 500 feet. Some Webbies attempted to run this all, but stopped short of halfway. The trail back down was even more painful on the legs; I took off my loud shoes for much of the way and showered my head in recently-boiled drinking water. After taking the cable car back down, legs aching, vendors pestering and bodies cooling, we piled into the bus with a much happier perception of the world. Not only had we conquered the amazing wall, we had returned to civilization with an understanding of our priveledged state of being. We followed the small road back partway, the bus storming down in between both sides of the road, horn sounding much of the way. We pulled into a restaurant next to a large craft warehouse ("factory", in someone's words). We ate a traditonal Chinese lunch and toured ourselves around the warehouse, getting some spectacular pictures of pottery, jewelry, jade sculptures and more.

Our next destination was the tomb of the Ming Emperor Chung, one of the few exhibits excavated and open to the public. We avoided the seven kilometer walk that the gods once required of the ancients, and quickly spread through the tomb - not too colorful except for some "spectacular red paint" in the terms of Will Stecher. It looked a lot like the Forbidden City, but much less crowded. There were some cool benches, carved to represent barrels or elephants. But the heat, somewhere in the nineties and humid, was unbearable.

We came to a five-story restaurant - the Peking Duck Restaurant, aptly named. We were greeted by a bright statue of a duck, one of the 1,000 killed here every day. Our meals have been simplified so we can soak up the senses and leave the brain - choice - out of it. That's one thing I love about this trip. So we were served duck, of course, on the third floor, along with many of the traditional side dishes. The duck was carved and served in front of us by a chef. We wrapped the duck in a tiny, thin "tortilla" (in the words of Kozden) and applied plum sauce and other dressings, then chomped. It was a really great mix of sweet sauce and vegetables, and moist, crunchy, slightly-meaty duck.

That evening we had a "free night," an excuse for me to go shopping and everybody else to go ice-skating. I visited the brand-name mall next door, as I had nowhere else to go at this time of night, and bought some shoes, shorts, and a shirt. The biggest shoes in the mall were size 11, so they hurt - but less so than my formal shoes. Tomorrow would be a flat day of walking. I realized I was running out of money, so I tried to pay with a credit card. Getting that to work was a nightmare, taking about thirty minutes. Once I had finished my necessary shopping (I had called Cathay to find they actually had no information on the whereabouts of my luggage after all), I had no time for fun.