The EMBA 2008 class in China!

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Everyone got in either at some point on Saturday or first thing Sunday morning. As a class we made a trip to the Great Wall at Badaling, about an hour from where we are staying. Badaling was the 1st part of the wall open to Westerners and it has been restored and well maintained. It’s also the most crowded part of the wall and has a bit of a tourist trap feel to it.

When we first got there we had a class picture taken at the wall and then went to explore it. You can climb it in either direction; one way is easier and one way is harder. I was hiking the harder way with my original study team (Doug, Phil, Steve, Karan and Jim. Scott’s plane was delayed so he missed the trip to the wall). It was a total contrast to the day before at Simatai. While still very steep in parts, there were handrails in many areas, the steps we complete and not worn away and the wall was fairly wide. It was a blast climbing with the guys and we went as far as you could on the difficult side as the remodeled part of the wall ends at one point and you’re not allowed to go any further.

It’s clear that this section of the wall is going to be featured during the Olympic broadcast. There’s a large Olympic sign positioned near it that you can see in some of my pictures. There’s also a bunch of tourist shops, an official Olympic store and a hotel at this section of the wall. It was a bit disappointing to see how commercialized it was, especially in contrast to the day before. However, it was pretty special to be climbing it with the group of people that I had just spent the last 2 years with at UCLA.

We left the wall in the early afternoon and stopped at market aimed at tourists (Friendship Store) and also had lunch there. Lunch was rather interesting with the variety of food presented and given the fact that much of it looked like the type of Chinese fast food that we get back home. After lunch and some shopping/browsing we headed back to the hotel for some rest before dinner later that night.

That night we went to dinner at the Fanshan Imperial restaurant in Beihei Park. This park was an imperial garden for over 100 years before it was opened to the public in 1925. The restaurant is housed in a building that was the “kitchen” for the empress and was beautifully decorated and restored. We had several interesting courses for dinner; some good and some not so good. We also had the chance to walk around the park and the large lake within it. The scenery was beautiful.

Today was somewhat of an anomaly for Beijing this time of year because it was not terribly hot (in the low 80’s), the humidity was low and there were blue skies all day long. I hadn’t seen blues skies since I had arrived in Beijing. We warned that it wouldn’t last which seemed somewhat ominous with the Olympics approaching.

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