Great Wall ascent - check!
On my last visit to Beijing, we went to the Badaling gate and climbed that portion of the wall. Today, we drove to the Mutianyu wall portion, which was interesting.
To get there we drive through a village that had once been very poor but today is very wealthy, because they make money from raising chestnuts and peaches, and inviting city folks to come stay in their farm houses or eat lunch with them and then pick their own fruit and chestnuts. Today, the river you drive over to get there had an especially happy holiday feel because there were lots of groups of people standing at the edge of the water and in the water, many using umbrellas as parasols to protect themselves from the sun, reaching into the water. We asked our guide David why, and he told us they had opened the dam further up the mountain, and people were picking fish out of the overflow water.
The Mutianyu portion has all kinds of hilarious additions designed to entertain the touristy masses. There is a cable car option and a chair lift option, for getting up the last part of the hill to the portion of the wall that runs between two peaks. They don't go to the same places exactly, though, and in our case the family we were touring with has two younger sons and did not feel comfy having them on an unsecured chair lift, so we split up -- they rode the enclosed cable car and we jumped onto the chair lifts.
The day was BEAUTIFUL -- blue skies, puffy white clouds, spectacular mountains framing the scene in every direction. We climbed the Wall from the portion we landed at to the top of the steep peak. Phew. A grueling climb, and even with me being pretty in shape, my legs were shaky jelly trying to manage the steep steps on the return trip. I was so impressed that we all 3 made it the whole way. Charlie did AWESOME.
Then we lined up for another hilarious tourist enticement -- the "sports sled" to the bottom of the mountain. It's a metal toboggan run you can ride to the bottom on little plastic sleds with foam runners. I think normally one could get going quite quickly on it, but there was a tensely upright Chinese man three sleds in front of me and Charlie who was crawling along with the brake stick in use the entire time. So we cruised along very peacefully, zig zagging down the mountain.
Slow Man made us a bit late to catch up with our group but not too bad -- and then back into the van, with the plan being to head back to Beijing and catch an acrobatics show!
The drive back to Beijing was just as long as the drive out -- about 2 hours -- but much more scenic. All the kids in the van faded along the way. For Charlie that mostly meant getting much less chatty. For our fellow family with 2 littler ones, they sized up the situation and decided their super-sleepy kids just did not have an acrobat show in them. I think I'd have decided the same thing in their place -- I remember well what it was like to travel China with jet-lagged preschool children! So we swung by their hotel, the very nice Renaissance, and dropped them off. Then off to the acrobats.
Our guide David got us a particularly nice set of seats in the VIP section as a special treat for Charlie. And boy was it! Some of what the people on stage did was just plain impressive ("Mommy, they should be in the OLYMPICS," whispered Charlie of the gymnasts dressed as warriors leaping through hoops) or unnerving (I was physically distressed watching the contortionist lady) and the final act, in which a series of motorcycles drive on stage and into a small mesh sphere where they drove in coordinated or interlocking loops, was pretty spectacular. I thought it was actually a great metaphor for traffic in Beijing, where the rules are just guidelines and yet everyone seems to just manage to slip past one another without disaster. (Charlie is turning out to be more rules-oriented than I would have thought -- one of his early reactions here on trying to cross the street when the little man turned green was, "Don't they have POLICE in Beijing?" "Yes, they do." "But then," sputtering with indignation, "why, why why don't they, you know, pull those people over? And some of them are going the wrong direction!? And the light was green!")
When the show was over the audience flooded out in a way that made me understand the reason for the signs that said "At show's end do not crowded, please orderly conduct." Or something similar. I do LOVE the English signage because of the happy accidents in translation and spelling. One of my favorites yesterday read "Do not dring and drive."
A ride back to our hotel, a goodbye to our very nice and helpful guide, and quick drop off of bags and washing of faces, and we were off again, walking through the hutongs toward a five-story fashion mall with a fearsomely elaborate roasted duck restaurant on the 5th floor. We were not dressed for all the dramatic splendor, but fortunately there were others in the same boat. There was a central square duck kitchen in the middle of a koi pond moat, where tall young men roasted ducks in either of 4 open fire hearths located at each of the 4 corners of the square. We watched them and waited for ages to get our table. But once seated, when the duck arrived, and was carved with great ceremony, and we wrapped it in the rice pancakes with all the little veggies and toppings, it was delicious. Charlie's pronounced "Duck is POWER," blissfully and tucked in.
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