The Greatest Wall

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A whole crew of people from the University, including Vice President Yaing, went to the Great Wall of China. The fog was even worse that day. So bad the highway was closed at one of the tollbooths. All gates were down and cars, buses and trucks alike were waiting in no particular order with their engines off and a cigarette in hand. In fog where you can’t see 3 center dashed lines in front of you, you can’t tell if you’re right next to a city or a field and if you didn’t know better, you’d think everyone here knows each other. There is no change of inflection for people who are related, friends or total strangers. Being in a place like China, I was comforted to be with people I trusted. Luckily, we only had to wait a few minutes before they opened the highway back up and we were on our way.

There is one Entrance for all the tourists, the Badiling entrance. After a pleasant lunch and purchasing a silk top, we decided between coats and hats and approached the Wall. My first picture of the wall is simply my hand touching it. You can feel the power and breathe the power. Or at least I think that is what I was breathing. If not it was just unpolluted air, which was just as good. it took 200 years to build, is 2,000 years old and 4,000 miles long. That's a WHOLE lot of stairs. The Wall wraps up and down the faces of the mountains like a dragon finding the most roundabout way to get north. A camera cannot capture the magnitude and power of this place. Things appearing out of the fog have a certain added drama, Luckily with the mountains came clear skies. We could not have had a better November day. Climbing and warm weather together, I was quickly shedding layers down to the T-shirt I tie died in Textile Treatment class and The T-shirt Masami gave me. Starting at Tower 1, you make your way up, down and around to each following Tower. At Tower 4, there was a live camel you could pay to take a picture on. The preceding year, dad made it all the way up to the top of Tower 8 with tens of students at his heels. This time he got to Tower 4 and his cold kicked in. So Jack, Vice Prez Yaing and I left my dad with two other members of our party with the camel and continued on. After about 50 pictures and some hundreds of stairs, we made it to 888 meters, which is a VERY lucky number for the Chinese. 8 is a lucky number, but 3 of them means luck in the way of longevity and money. There are carvings of bats, which mean happiness and turtles, which mean longevity, everywhere up there. The Chinese say "Not a lucky hero until one reaches the Great Wall". So now I can actually fulfill my RedHotz personality because I reached Tower 8 of the Great Wall. I forgot to take a 360 movie of the top of the Wall, but I’m going to write that off to knowing subconsciously that it wasn’t meant to be. That view was only meant for my brain and for me alone. Anyone who wants to experience that kind of exhilaration has to make it to the Great Wall.

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Photos

A funny road sign
It says "Don't Drive Tiredly"

View from the TOP
At 888 meters up, "One cannot be a hero until they reach the Great Wall".

Roller Coaster
you can roller coaster from tower 4 back to tower 1!