China - Day Two

Day two in China was even better than the first day, mostly because it involved climbing the Great Wall. If there was one thing I was most excited for, it was to see the Great Wall of China (in Chinese, it actually translates to Long Wall) in person. It was more incredible than I had anticipated. (And also, a whole lot more taxing to climb. Sheesh.)

Our day started with a trip to a jade carving factory. This sculpture is made from one solid piece of jade. We saw various statues made of jade, watched artisans carving the jade, and learned how to distinguish real jade from the fake stuff. (Real jade should look cloudy when held up to the light because of all the minerals inside it. Fake jade will look clear or solid.) Of course, this was mostly a ploy to have people spend lots of money on jade jewelry and sculptures. Even though the jewelry was quite pretty, it's not really my style and so we opted instead to purchase a small carving of a jade owl and a jade ornament for our Christmas tree. (We buy ornaments from every place that we visit.)

Our next stop was the Great Wall. There are several passes along the Great Wall's 4,000 mile long stretch where you can easily begin a climb of the wall. This spot was particularly full of tourists because it's only an hour drive from Beijing. This gate serves as the starting point for a journey up the wall on the sides of two mountains.

You can see that the wall at this particular point forms a circle. The buildings in the center once served as barracks for soldiers but have now been converted into a whole host of souvenir shops. The majority of the Great Wall has greatly deteriorated in the 400 years since it served as China's main protection from northern invaders. Mao--doing something uncharacteristically good to preserve China's heritage--decided that certain sections of the wall should be re-built and reinforced. The wall we climbed was well-maintained and had much needed hand-rails. But there's also sections of the wall that's called the wild wall that are overgrown with vegetation and missing many of its stones. In fact, if you want to climb along the wild wall, you often have to pay residents to walk through their courtyards in order to stay on its path. Apparently, many people took the stones from the wall to build their homes. Someday, I'd love to walk on the more out-of-the-way and wild parts of the Great Wall. Still, I'm glad for the experience I did have.

Look how excited David is to start the climb. We had two hours to climb the wall and we had to choose between two sides:

The easier, less steep side.....

.....or the insanely steep, almost vertical side.....

.....with steps that were sometimes over a foot high.


Naturally, we chose the really steep side. Being six months pregnant wasn't going to stop me from getting the best view possible.

Though I will admit there were moments I wasn't so sure we'd made the right choice. But it was worth it in the end. Plus, it was really funny to watch people's faces (particularly Asians) when they realized this pregnant woman was beating them up the wall. Two men (from Spain, we think) even stopped on their way down to applaud me. (They literally stopped and clapped as I climbed past them. It was hilarious.)

The view was incredible and we had another absolutely beautiful, clear day to enjoy it which was extremely lucky.

I had erroneously thought that once we got onto the wall, it would mostly be a paved, flat walkway like what you see David standing on. I didn't take into account the fact that the wall scales China's mountains and would be very steep at parts. (But then again, all my previous impressions of the Great Wall had been informed by Mulan. And Disney is not really known for their historical accuracy.) But now I know better.

Along the way, there are outposts and towers which you can also climb to the top of to get even better views of the valley.

About an hour into our climb, we decided to head back down (which took us waaay less time than it took to climb up). We'd managed to make it to about 4 towers, but I did have to move at a much slower pace than usual. Still, we made it a lot farther than the majority of our tour group, so I felt pretty good about that.

After reaching the bottom again, David and I had to buy ourselves some Great Wall T-shirts (which will hopefully fit me when I'm not carrying around a basketball-sized belly) and ate delicious frozen treats. Thankfully, our next stop was lunch at the Friendship Store which felt a bit like a big roadside rest stop. The restaurant served a smattering of different Chinese foods (and it was all delicious but that could have been because of my immense hunger by this point). Attached to the restaurant was a big store full of every kind of Chinese art, craft, jewelry, silk, tea sets, scrolls, fans, and souvenirs possible. They had some nice things but the majority of it looked like all the same stuff you can find in any Chinatown in America.

After lunch, we visited the Ming tombs, where 13 of the 16 Ming dynasty emperors are buried throughout the valley. We only visited one burial ground and its complex.

By this time, dark clouds had started to roll in and we were even treated to some lightning and thunder.

David and I bought a Chinese scroll from an artist's booth at the tombs. It's just Chinese cherry blossoms but I didn't realize quite how big it was when we bought it. It takes up our whole wall! By the time we were leaving, it had started to rain but it was over by the time we reached our next destination, a pearl factory. This was even more of ploy to buy jewelry than the jade factory was but David and I found no need to spend our money on jewelry I'd hardly ever wear. (Although the purple pearls were quite pretty.) Luckily, the Suchuan restaurant we ate at that night was right next door to the pearl factory.

Our last stop that night was Wangfujing Street in downtown Beijing. It's the ritzy shopping district in Beijing full of stores like Gucci, Prada, and more, but it's mostly famous for its night markets which are stocked with the grossest, most disgusting street foods imaginable.

All along this stretch of food is booth after booth of food on a stick. And I use the word "food" very loosely. I would never want any of this stuff to come anywhere close to my mouth.

Centipede? Snake? Sheep's penis? Sounds tasty, right?

Or how about a fried seahorse?

But the most disgusting thing were the scorpions. And I actually witnessed several people eating these things. One man on our bus ate them and it said it tasted like extra crispy fried chicken. Just....ew. As David says, there are only a few creatures that he considers pure evil and centipedes and scorpions top the list. I'd have to agree.

In the short amount of time that we were given to gawk over the street foods, David and I managed to find a bookstore where we bought a children's set of encyclopedias in Chinese (to help David study) and several Chinese children's books (which tell traditional Chinese stories and include both Chinese and English, thank goodness).

We arrived back at our hotel that night exhausted but extremely satisfied. We went for a quick swim in the hotel's pool before showering and hitting the bed. Only one day left.