Visiting The Great Wall has been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember. I mean - it’s The Great Wall after all!
Of course, our trip wasn’t quite what I’d envisioned. That’s the trouble with things on your bucket list. You always romanticize them and they’re never quite what you’d dreamed.
I wanted to climb the Wild Wall - the part of The Wall that isn’t so touristy - picnic and watch the sun come up over the mountains. Instead, we walked up the incredibly steep, stone path lined with people hawking stuff and took a cable car.
The hike up the path is a little bit strenuous. Add chasing/carrying two toddlers and a bad case of bronchitis to the mix and it became a heck of a lot more challenging. Of course, Hudson - the most independent person on the planet - insisted on walking the whole thing himself and he didn’t even want to hold our hand. If the path got too steep, he’d get down and crawl and then get up again to walk. He was determined!
Whether our visit was according to plan or not, it was still breath-taking. The one true shame is that as is somewhat typical of Beijing, the air was really hazy with pollution so we couldn’t really see the mountains which would have made it all the more beautiful. Of course, yesterday was perfectly clear. Such is life.
And yes, I read all the facts and figures about it, but visiting it made me really realize just how massive it is. If you picked up the wall and put it in the US, it would stretch from the East Coast to the West Coast. It’s truly an engineering feat of astonishing proportions. They also call it The Great Tomb because so many Chinese died building it to keep out the nomadic tribes raiding from the North. Personally, I think it was just a crazy dream of the Emperor to build a wall like this. The mountains are hard enough to cross.
Getting to The Great Wall isn’t all that easy. We took our van from Beijing which takes about 1.5 hours up some pretty, winding roads. On the way, we stopped and had lunch at this GIANT dining hall where all the tourist busses stop. The neat thing is that the space was divided up into all these smaller “rooms” by using greenery. In the center was a big fountain which gave the huge room a more intimate feel. The food wasn’t very good though. Who knows? Maybe I’ll lose some of my Singapore weight if this keeps up. I can only dream.
We also stopped at a jade factory where we got to see them making things out of jade and got a lesson in jade quality. Tom hates these shopping trips set up by the tour companies. Of course, these shopping excursions help keep the cost of the tour down because the shops pay the tour companies a fee when you go there. Everything in the factories is more expensive than if you bought it on the street. Then again, there is no such thing as buying it on the street because we have no down time to shop. It is what it is and while it may be more expensive than on the street, it’s cheaper than the States - and it’s from our trip to China, right?
I take that back. We could have bought lots of trinkets at The Great Wall. All sorts of crap, cheaper than the same crap we saw in Shanghai. The walk up to The Great Wall is LINED with stall after stall of things like fans, dolls, dresses, hats, shirts, tapestries - I mean - everything. The one thing I wished I bought was a t-shirt for Hudson that said, “I Climbed The Great Wall” because he literally did!
Walking on top of The Wall isn’t all that easy either. There are lots of tiny steps, then giant, deep steps, then tiny steps. Very little of it is just clear walking. We bribed the kids with jelly beans to take family pictures. The third guy finally got a good one of us all! Whew.
We wandered for about an hour and then my fever-riddled body just couldn’t do it any more. Plus, you see a part of the restored Great Wall, you’ve seen it all in many ways.
On the way home, we stopped at yet another factory, this one making cloissonne. I learned a lot here actually. The stuff starts at copper and is molded by hammering. Then women hand glue on copper filaments. The designs are filled with natural pigments taken from the mountains. Since the colors shrink, the area has to be filled again and again. Then it’s all polished. All told, it can take 19 days for a small pot!
Our last stop was Olympic Park and the Bird’s Nest. We went inside, but there wasn’t much to see. I hear that many of the venues in China are falling into disrepair because they don’t have the money to keep them up which is tragic, but the Bird’s Nest looked pretty good. We grabbed the kids McDonald’s which made them SO happy. Hudson ate NINE nuggets. He usually eats four!
My fever was back up around 103 by the time we got back to the room. So much for the Singapore antibiotics working. I got a three day supply and today is Day 3. Ho hum. I put on all our sweaters and coats and packed us up and went straight to bed. It seems so unfair to be this sick on our trip-of-a-lifetime to China. I’m not the kind of gal who gets homesick much, but being here when I’m this sick makes me long for the ease of American life. I just want to lay in my comfortable bed and watch something brainless like “Grey’s Anatomy” or “30 Rock” and have some chicken soup. Greasy noodles aren't really what the doctored ordered.
When I was a little girl, whining about sick not being fairy childhood doctor, Dr. Wyvell, once told me, 'Nothing in life is far. The closest thing is a four way stop." So there you have it.