China Day 3: Stairs

This post was written on Tuesday, July 13, China time. (I give up on the times.)

wow, i'm so out of shape.


today christine and i became real people (according to a statement made by chairman mao lol), by climbing the bajillion steep stairs on the great wall of china.  luckily, today was another gray smoggy day so it was cool outside.  


day started at 7am.  woke up and had breakfast and managed to not get our table reset before meeting our tour guide, scott, at 8:30.  We also explored the garden area behind the hotel, which has a pretty waterfall, pond, pavilion, big bird cage, and some steps up to a stone roof overlooking the garden.  There were also some old ladies and men doing tai chi with fans and swords.  It was fun to watch ^ ^

the itinerary for today was the great wall and ming tombs.


i think my favorite parts of our tour so far are the funny detours.  we made a quick stop to a jade gallery, which had hundreds of statues and jewelry made of jade.  we were greeted in english by a nice old man who then proceeded to tell us about the history of jade in a mix of english, mandarin and vietnamese :P he also asked, after i told him that i graduated from college, if i was married :( i don't look that old do i???  No, you don't.  I don't know why he asked that :(  I also don't know why he insisted on trying to talk to us in Chinese/Vietnamese when English is our first language, and we couldn't understand the more advanced terms he was using ;;  My Chinese is fail XD

 

 

great wall was next.  again, the chinese really like things big. REALLY BIG. lol the wall is absolutely massive and it's crazy to think about the manpower that actually went into building all of it.  actually what was actually crazier was that christine and i made it up to one of the top watchtowers panting while old japanese ladies and chinese ladies in heels were doing ok lol

Well, there were only a couple in heels, but I did overhear a conversation between a lady and her mother, who was like a grandmother, and I think they were planning to go further than we were.  I was impressed, because we were totally gross and sweaty and completely winded XD  We got some nice pictures though, and hung out for a little while on top of the roof of one of the watchtowers.  Tiffy wanted a jump picture, so I tried to take ones for her, which was kind of a fail at first...  Then she took one for me, and some random guy near us also jumped when I did.  It was kind of random, but yeah... Then he asked us to take a jump picture for him, too.  TOtally random.  But at least he was nice about it, unlike this random Korean guy along the wall who just shoved his camera at Tiffy as she was walking by and told her to take a picture for them o.O;  But ahh~ the view was so gorgeous.  The mountains were a bit misty in the distance, covered in beautiful greenery, and lined with the stunning Great Wall.  Definitely worth a trip!  But maybe not two, because it's a lot of exercise XD 

Interesting thing about the Great Wall: it's the longest defensive structure in the world, but it's also called the longest cemetery because of how many people died to build it.  Those people were all buried inside the wall.  Possible manga scene?  :3  Lots of ghosties walking along a huge wall...

took about 1.5-2 hours to climb up and down the section of wall we were on and we headed off to a disappointing lunch...again. why westernized asian food?! ughhhhhhhhhhh ate at the restaurant in one of china's "friendship stores". apparently they were initially built for foreigners to get their western necessities.  christine noticed that everything in there was chinese souvenirs lol  Which was really weird; those don't look like Western necessities to me, haha.  They had some cute pandas and interesting things, but everything was REALLY expensive.  One medium-sized panda for US$30 =\  I guess that's what we get for being in a tourist trap.  It was weird though, one sales lady was totally following us around until we finally went into the bathroom to get rid of her XD

headed to the ming tombs after. it was pretty interesting although there wasn't much to see.  i hadn't realized that china's imperial tombs were very similar to the egyptian burial system with underground chambers and such :P the experience was ruined by other pushy loud tourists though :(

Pushy tourist groups aside, the Ming Tombs (tomb, really, since we only saw the biggest one) were nice.  There is one gate that is the divide between this life and the next; one side is "yang" and the other "yin," and when you pass through it in one direction, you say "I'm coming," and in the other direction, "I'm leaving."  An interesting thing about the tomb we visited is that it was the tomb of the emperor who built the tombs and several other places in Beijing, and who was considered the best emperor of the Ming dynasty.  There are 12 other tombs, none of which are bigger than the first (out of respect), and whenever the later emperors came to visit/do ancestor worship, they had to walk in on foot to show respect.  The tomb itself (with the body) is 27 meters deep under a mountain and has 5 chambers.  The rear chamber is the most important, as it holds the body of the emperor.  Royal family members and the high officials were the only ones who underwent the special burial called "The Jade Burial Above the Golden Well."  The body is surrounded with jade, which represents life (yang), and the body is dead (yin), and it's placed above a small rectangular well filled with earth (represented by the color yellow, if you remember from yesterday).  The earth is there to keep balance and communicate between the yin and yang.  When our guide first said it, I thought he said Golden Whale, and I was really confused XD

The Spirit Tower

The Gate between Yin and Yang

By the way, that would make a nice addition to our manga -- there is a secret passageway into all of the tombs, but that particular one has never been looted because it's so deep and the area has always been heavily guarded.  So, maybe a part where you have to find the secret passageway and go into the chamber with the emperor's ghostie to get something or other?

headed back after that and we found ourselves, at 4pm in Beijing, with nothing to do.  there's nothing around the hotel and we wanted to avoid shopping.  watched mtv for 2 hours lol and finally managed to sprawl out of our beds to buy snacks at the supermarket and get peking duck at a restaurant nearby.  it was quite good, although we didn't know how to order, one waiter gave us tea without tea cups and our actual waiter gave us our bill after pulling it balled up from his butt pocket -_-  I think he was mad at us because he kept getting scolded by another lady waitress, but actually the things she was scolding him for (like not giving us tea cups) weren't really his fault (since someone else brought us the tea).

Garnishes

Back at the hotel, we saw a lady playing piano~  It was prettyful.  I want to hear someone play like that for me XD  I just like to listen.

exploring on our own tomorrow :) should be a lot more fun

oh and as a treat, engrish!

btw, in chinese it says tourists are not allowed to enter