I've seen some pretty good walls in my day...

How is everyone doing today?  Me?  I'm doing great!  We had a fantastic day today with a visit to The Great Wall just one component of it.

We actually started the day with a brief stop at a Jade Museum.  There were some really neat display pieces including some really ancient jade artefacts.  Attached to that was, of course, a facility about 4 times the size of the museum that was dedicated to selling jade.  Still, it was pretty fun to go and look around, and they were doing some amazing work there.

I was also able to find a tribute to Michael Jackson in the form all great artists aspire to - a can of Pepsi.

After that we headed off to The Great Wall!  There were a few things that I was really looking forward to on this trip, and visiting The Great Wall topped that list for sure, so I was pretty excited.  What was especially amazing was that the weather today was fantastic.  Every day since we've arrived in Beijing it's been very, very hazy.  Even when we were in Chengde (look I spelled it correctly!) which is some two and half hours to the north you could barely make out anything more than a kilometre away.  I'm not sure if it was pollution, or purely a meteorological condition.  Either way we had a nice rain last night and awoke to the clearest skies I've seen this entire trip.  The hazy conditions have made photography difficult, so the sudden clarity on my most anticipated expedition was a real bonus.  It also made the drive up to the wall a lot more interesting as I was really able to admire the mountainous landscape with a lot more detail.

The Great Wall gets it's name for a reason... it's a pretty spectacular thing to behold.  At the gate we were visiting (Juyongguan) you can head in two different directions.  We were told that the left hand path was the more difficult, and hence the one that I wanted to tackle.  Euphy wasn't feeling very confident after looking at the path though, so we opted for the right hand path.

Euphy has never expressed any great concern over heights, but we discovered today that she has a pretty serious phobia regarding steep and uneven staircases.  Not sure if there's a word for that.  In the end it was probably a very good decision to take the easier path.  In the picture above you can actually see the end of the line for this brief stretch of the wall.  It's just to the left of that reddish watch tower, near the left hand side of the picture.  To compare, here's a picture I took from the easy path that shows the difficult path:

It really did look like a much steeper climb.  The path we took had a couple small watch towers along its length, and we were able to go in one.

That was my attempt at impersonating a soldier keeping a watchful eye out for invading Mongolians.  You'll notice however that I was looking at the stretch of wall that we still had left to climb, and therefore I appear to watching out for Flying Mongolians.  Far more dangerous those.

Despite the whole thing being a bit hard on Euphy's nerves we made it to the end of the path.

Please note the carvings on the wall.  Please also note that if I ever catch anyone carving their name into a Wonder of the World I will beat them more senseless than they already are.

So, a great visit to a great wall, with great weather.  I really couldn't have asked for much more than that today.  But wait, there's more!  We headed from The Great Wall to a site called the Ming Tombs.  Of the 16 Ming Dynasty emperors, 13 of them are buried at this one site.  We were able to visit the tomb of one emperor, 9 stories underground.  The site is a cavernous underground structure that really is amazing given the technology of the time.  The site is beautifully preserved, and while there are modern walls throughout the building that are obviously structural, they've done their best to make them as unobtrusive as possible to really reveal the original structure.  The whole thing is divided into several rooms, often with odd lighting, so I wasn't able to get any one picture that really captured the scale of that place.  Suffice it to say that those Ming folks really knew how to entomb a fellow.

We finished the day off with a visit to a tea shop where they taught us about all sorts of lovely teas.  It was pretty interesting, and we got to sample a great variety of them.  It finished with a high-pressure sales pitch that had Euphy mildly annoyed, but we brushed it off since we'd had such a good day up until that point.

It actually wasn't the tea shop that grabbed my attention the most during that part of the tour though.  Instead it was this structure just outside:

Pretty nice arch over the road.  Very Chinese.  Nice characters on the arch.  Euphy translated them for me.  Want to know what they say?  Chinatown.  No kidding.  It actually lists that area of Beijing as Chinatown.  I was under the impression that when in China you could simply refer to Chinatown as Town.  Both Euphy and I were utterly confused as to what it was that would differentiate this part of town from any other section of Beijing.  I'd have thought that if they wanted to a particularly ethnic section of the town they'd have dedicated a street to selling hamburgers and bluejeans and called it Whiteytown.  I'm still baffled.

We went from there to dinner.  I may have cursed myself yesterday by boasting about the quality of the food we've been given.  Today's dinner was hotpot, which can be quite good if the broth isn't completely bland.  I actually turned to Euphy at one point during the meal and said "You know, right across the road from our hotel there's a McDonalds..."  We didn't actually resort to that drastic measure, but it was a bummer to have even thought that given how lucky we'd been up until this point.

Well, I've had to be unfortunately brief this time out.  We had to spend a lot of time organizing our bags this evening.  Tomorrow is our last full day in Beijing, and we fly out early Thursday morning.  We didn't want to leave all the packing until last night just in case we get in late.  So here I am again feeling pressed for time.  I hope you're all doing well, but I'm heading to bed.