One Great Wall, One Great Day

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I've flown hundreds of times over the years, but the miracle of high-speed, long-distance jet travel never ceases to amaze me. So much so that whenever we travel overseas, Andi teases me because I inevitably say something like: "Can you believe that just yesterday we were walking the dog back in Rye and now we're in (FILL IN THE BLANK AMAZING LOCATION.)"

Well, Andi wouldn't have been surprised to hear me repeating that refrain this morning when I found myself climbing the steep steps of the Great Wall of China surrounded by thousands of Chinese tourists. We "did" the wall at Badalang, the most visited and most touristy of the Great Wall sites, because we wanted to see it as the average Chinese person would.

Apropos of that, our adventure began by taking the subway at 7:30 am to an outdoor train depot where we searched around until we found the 887 bus to Badalang. Not much leg room, but a clean bus and what a bargain -- 12 yuan each way, about $2, for the roughly one-hour ride out of modern Beijing and into China's ancient past.

When we arrived I got my first real taste of China. Literally. First we both had a late breakfast of a sort of egg pancake stuffed with salad: hot and delicious. Then I ate a giant roasted corn on a stick. Fung -- my brother Jeff and my term for exotic Chinese street food -- at last.

We took a slide car -- a very 70s amusement park looking contraption -- up to the wall from the bus depot/tourist stall area. Once up there, we got a good bit of exercise ascending very towers and stretches of wall for an hour and a half or so. The guidebook says that the wall stretched more than 8000 kilometers. It's so hard to imagine how people could create such a colossus out of massive stones high up in the mountains without any mechanical equipment. When we weren't pondering that the views and the people watching were quite entertaining.

After scaling the wall, we took the 877 bus back to Beijing. Thanks to Chris's assortment of iPhone apps we discovered that the bus depot was very close to Houhai, a houtang neighborhood (old-fashioned alleyway housing) that surrounds two small lakes lined by bars and restaurants. (Thanks to Jacob Ulevich for his recommendations on what to see in Beijing which were passed along by my friend and colleague Robin Edwards.) It was great to stroll around the lakes with other Sunday revelers and take in phenomena like a pair of older women dancing a sort of Chinese tango to recorded music, people swimming laps across the lake (in the US I'm sure the place would have been plastered with "no swimming" signs) and people getting around in all sorts of two and three wheeled conveyances from bikes with special carriers to rickshaws to motorcycles modified to have two wheels in the back and an enclosed housing for two passengers.

From there we took a two-subway line, half-hour trip to the Panijayuan, a huge market featuring antiques, jewelry, ceramics, carved stone pieces and much more. Some peddlers had covered stalls, some had shops and others lay their wares out on blankets on the ground. I haggled with one of those weekend "dirt market" vendors for a ceramic cup featuring a joint portrait of Chairman Mao and Chou Enlai in their green revolutionary caps. Our complete inability to speak one another's languages resulted in our bargaining by punching in numbers on her calculator.

Now I'm back in my room and jet lag is hitting hard. Too sleepy to start uploading pictures, but rest assured the trip is being well documented with photos that will be shared!
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