hello everyone! (and a special hello to Mrs. Johnson's students!) I wish I could post pictures up here, so you could see how small I look in comparison to the Great Wall, but the internet is still too slow for that, so I will have to describe it as best I can!
We all piled into two busses early yesterday morning, and headed out about due north of Beijing. Beijing city itself is surrounded by "ring roads" - circular highways that loop around the city - so you can tell how far out you are by which ring road you're on. The first ring road is a mythical loop around the Forbidden City - it doesn't exist in reality, but serves as a marker for the "true" center of Beijing. I live just outside the second ring road in the northwestern part of the city. The third ring road is pretty built up, and the fourth ring road is where the IKEA is (on the northeastern corner). To give you an idea of how congested the traffic in the city is, it took us a good twenty or thirty minutes just to make our way from the second ring road to the third, and then to the expressway leading out of the city - and all this on a Saturday morning!
Beijing goes from all tall buildings to fields pretty quickly - reminded me a lot of most major German cities. It took us about an hour to get to the Wall once we left the fifth ring road behind us (I think that sixth and seventh ring roads are in the works) - our bus driver got lost at one point, and had to pull over to the side of the road to ask someone for directions in an unintelligible local dialect, but it was a brief detour, and we were soon on our way again.
The mountains around Beijing seem to rise up out of nowhere - maybe the closest comparison is the way the Rocky Mountains rise up west of Denver. The road got narrower and narrower as we headed up into the hills, and then dead-ended abruptly at the parking lot. (If anyone wants to look up pictures online, just google Mutianyu Great Wall, as that's where we were). There was no pass through the mountains where we were - just a very steep rise, and up on top of the mountain... a very big wall!
There was a gondola going straight up the mountain, but doubting the safety of Chinese gondolas, and wanting to get some exercise, I decided to take the stairs. There were a LOT of stairs. Steep stairs. About 750m straight up of stairs. Still, at the top of the stairs was a small passageway into the Great Wall itself (there are only passageways into the Wall from the Chinese side, interestingly enough. If you drop your hat off the wall on the Mongolian side, you're out of luck, because you're NOT getting it back!) The Wall at its lowest is abbout 20 feet high, and it can get higher according to the terrain. There are also places where it tips to the side a bit (and signs in Chinese telling you "do NOT lean on the Wall").
The overall length of the restored section of the Wall I was on totaled 3 km - I walked up probably about 1.5k before coming to the end. I took a picture of the unrestored section of the wall, which I really wish I could post here - it's just amazing. It beats Hadrian's wall hands-down. It runs literally along the ridgetops of mountains that are a good 2000-3000 feet high, and possibly higher. It boggles my mind how they could have built it - there's no water up there, let alone how they could have quarried the stones down below and carried them up top. It's just unreal - from where I was, you could look across the valley and see the Wall continuing on the mountains on the other side - mountains a good 20 miles away. How they did it I don't know, but it's just amazing!
It was great to get out and get some exercise on the wall - I haven't really been exercising much, mostly because I've been so busy and jet-lagged, but also because I haven't really wanted to go running - partly because of the air pollution (I really noticed the less polluted air outside of the city yesterday) and because of the whole space-alien effect - if people look at me funny when I'm just walking down the street, imagine what their reaction would be to me running down the street in spandex tights!!! no, thanks!!! hopefully Harbin will be a better place to get outside. I've been going for walks here every day, just to stay active to some extent, but other than that have just been doing homework and sleeping. Also doing random stuff like going to IKEA, but for the most part keeping things pretty low-key.
Today will be spent filling out my application to go to Harbin - looks like my topic will be intellectual property rights, but I have to figure out what exactly I want to focus on, and what exactly I hope to get out of it. Hopefully will have time to do some background reading before I head up there, and Dad, don't forget to go to Franklin Pierce and find out what suggestions they might have! (thanks in advance!) I will be back with an update later on - the internet seems to be functioning especially well today, so will keep fingers crossed that it keeps up. more later!
