Day Eighteen - Jun 13, 2013
Beijing, China
Daily Didactic
Cindy talked us into a 6:30am departure this morning. If you know us at all, you know this time of day is reserved for work days if no airplane is involved. Our goal for the day was the Great Wall, and Cindy arranged a driver to meet us in the kitchen. Turned out to be a brilliant move. Tom drove us an hour and a half to the less trafficked Mutianyu segment. After a tram ride up, we saw no one else on the wall for the first hour or so (other than a quickly left behind group of well to do 20 somethings). It was pretty magnificient. The wall is a really crazy engineering feat that, at the same time, doesn't really seem all that likely to have stopped anyone with a moderately tall ladder. We had three hours and hiked an hour and fourty five minutes out (uphill) and and an hour an fifteen minutes back (downhill). We made it one tower beyond the restored section of the wall. The last chunk was pretty interesting, in that the wall at this point served like a long window planter of trees. In spite of the ridiculous (but less severe than in Beijing) pollution, it was a really spectacular hike. We caught the tram back down and met Tom at around 10:30. An hour and a half later he dropped us off at the Lama Temple in spite of Brian's typing into his iPhone translation app that we were heading to the "Llama Temple". Turns out Dali Lama, not pack animal. The Lama Temple is an active Buddhist temple and was not only beautiful, but full of worshippers. Worship involved the lighting of incense and bowing a number of times to the items inside each temple building. It was moving and made touristing feel a little awkward. The temple opens to the public form 9:00-4:00 each day, presumably to fund non-tourist pursuits. For dinner we headed out for "drunken shrimp". We found the restaurant but not the meal, defeated by our lack of Chinese speaking skills. Irrespective of shrimp content, we enjoyed a truly excellent and un-American Chinese dinner (bones in your sweet and sour pork anyone?), returned home and called it a day. One more big touristing day tomorrow before heading back to the states...
Today's Photos
