I have both seen the Great Wall and been served more broccoli

It’s been a long and crazy day here.  I started off strong with a breakfast coup in the form of an entire jar of peanut butter down at the buffet line and I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that nearly moved me to tears.   It was only the recent memory of this confection that got me through the lunch presentation today, which included a fantastic plate of broccoli, with some cauliflower added in for contrast/to prevent me from eating the napkins.  In addition, special for me as the vegetarian at the table, they brought out a corn-in-tomato-sauce combination that none of us has ever thought of combining and I moved to Eating Plan B, which was a Clif bar and coke.

None of which is to underscore the more important highlights of the day.  We did indeed make it to the Great Wall and I, who proudly and arrogantly discusses my Stadium steps victories constantly, started whining after about 10 of these gigantic and hugely uneven steps but carried on until the Third Tower, where I found Ron, relaxed and long-waiting for me, ready to go up even further. I hope that at some point, the armies building these walls realized they did not need to build the Wall at all, but merely needed to focus their efforts on maximizing the rise and height variation of the steps, which could trip up almost anyone.  

Here’s the wall as we drove up and I thought it looked like a nice little climb.

And now here is me assessing the difficulty of the steps and deciding that I had to get out of doing them even if it meant letting Ron go without me and with this group of random strangers.  

This is a picture of us at the stairs before I had gotten all the way to the base of the steps. I did not know that the stairs would look so lethal and I did not know that someone else would soon serve me another meal of broccoli and rice.

We’ve had a chance to talk with our guide as we drive around, and as with my other tours, we gain a lot of insight into the country.  Hao told us a lot about the One Child policy here, which has now been replaced with a two child policy and is due to be written off completely by 2020.  It’s funny just to listen to him talk about it as a policy at all and realize that when the government decreed it, most people complied.   There were always exceptions, according to Hao: if both parents had PhDs, you could have two kids and now you can have three.  Or if you wanted to ignore the rule, you could have a second kid but the government would fine you the amount of 3 times your annual salary…can you imagine??

We toured a lot of other places today but they are a typical blur.  My standout moments are remembering to put the toilet paper into the trash can once today and successfully crossing a large Beijing street.   I was able to catch a picture of one of those group outdoor dance things today.  I saw tons of them again.  Tomorrow we are apparently going to the some Palace and it will be crawling with outdoor dance fitness groups.  Hao says they all dance to this one song called Little Apple or something like that…it swept the country a few years back.   The other pics below are of a trash motorcycle guy – check out the equipment on his little bike – not only does he empty the trash, but I watched him work for awhile as we sat, stranded in traffic – he washed and dries the cans themselves.  Last pic is just a street scene – another busy corner as we sat in traffic for a bit on the bus.

It’s once again bedtime here but I wanted to leave you with one other victory.  As many of you know, quiet and largely unsocial me will go to quite some length to “run into” people while I travel around.  We did Paris and Venice meet-ups with my family, Barcelona and Paris with a couple of Rick Steves people.  And so a while back, I found out that some old family friends were somehow going to be in Beijing with us and staying only 4 miles away and so I set up a plan to meet up with them when I didn’t understand how hard it was to get around in Beijing.  I had planned for us to walk there and back.  But we didn’t get back from our trip to the Wall until 6pm and by then I had had enough time in the bus, watching traffic, to realize that, if we attempted to walk it, we stood a fair chance of getting hit by a bus or just a bike if we were lucky and so, instead of cancelling like a normal person would, I came up with the back up plan of taking the Beijing subway.

Sometimes it is clear from Ron’s expression that he is doing everything he can to not go down to the front desk, get out his credit card and rent a separate room for himself so he can insulate himself from my planning.  But he gamely came with me.  I had a map clutched in my hands and had practiced saying the name of my departure stop, transfer stop and arrival stop.  We went down the escalator, surrounding by literally thousands of Chinese citizens on their way home and successfully purchased two tickets…30 cents each!!  And then we successfully located our train and rode it to meet up with our friends and I was bursting with pride the entire time.  We were quite the attraction…the only non-Chinese on the train and all eyes were on us and what we could possibly be doing there.  The only glitch in the system was actually locating our friends as we exited the station because, although we agreed to exit the Northwest exit and I was proud to find the correct signage, it turned out that there’s a NW A,B, C,D,E and F and so we all wandered around for a good 20 minutes, texting each other and walking around but never managing to hit the same station at the same time.

Oh, and two more pictures. One is of us at the Great Wall.  We had stopped this guy to take a picture of us and he did but then he and all his friends wanted pictures with us and so we let them have at it and he left us with a souvenir on our camera. And the last one is a food stall we walked by on our outing tonight…squid, dear god.   I love this county so far, but the food…it’s exactly what I expected.  I go to bed hoping that jar of peanut butter is still out tomorrow morning.  Tomorrow we get to take a rickshaw ride and then we fly to Xi’an

TTFN/V