China, day 3 (July 1, 2006)
… another day. The pictures my father has taken so far are up: Trip to China 2006 gallery (thanks to Jon for the gallery space).
Dawn of the Third Day
24 Hours Remain
(And probably no one gets the Majora's Mask joke.)
On the third day, we visited the Great Wall. Jason got a taxi for the day for him, one of his employees, and us. Instead of going to the nearby Badaling section of the Great Wall, which is very crowded, we drove over an hour away from Beijing to Mutianyu.
The Great Wall is built at the very top of a mountain range, so we had to walk up. The first section has a lot of vendors trying to sell stuff. We avoided them, leaving the shopping for when we came back down. As we went up to the Great Wall, there was a series of museums. Most of the items were "peculiar stones" with labels (in Chinese, but Jason translated) of what they supposedly looked like. I believe this one is labeled "Titanic":
Once we finally climbed up to the Great Wall, we had only just begun climbing stairs.
We walked quite a way down the Great Wall and took a lot of pictures. Interestingly, there seemed to be more non-Chinese tourists than there were Chinese tourists. Most of them were speaking English, but we also heard French, Spanish, Italian, and Korean.
As you can see in the photo above, I was wearing my Yale Physics Olypmics t-shirt. As we were walking, someone walking the other way saw the shirt and told me that he had been there in 2004. (I was there in 2005.)
The other interesting encounter I had on the Great Wall was with a group of four Chinese girls, who were tourists from near Changdou. First, one of them came up to me and took a picture of me next to her with her camera phone. Then, all four posed for a picture with me (which is now my Facebook picture):
We walked a bit further after that to get to the cable car down. We decided that we were not up for walking back down. Of course, we were welcomed as we got off the cable car:
Where the cable car line ends, the vendors begin. I saw more "I climbed the Great Wall" t-shirts than I ever wanted to see. The vendors are very aggressive. You could not tell them that you are not going to buy something. Every time you say "no" and try to walk away, they offer a lower price. Some of them spoke enough English to tell us the prices, but most had pocket calculators to type the price into. That was a lot of fun, and eventually we had bought a few items and returned to the taxi.
Now, in the morning I had not been paying too much attention to the taxi driver. I did notice him passing a few people on the right in the morning, but that is it. Oh, and that the trucks that he passed on the right were in the rightmost lane. That is just normal Beijing traffic. The car in front of us had done the same thing.
What I found most interesting/amusing is that the taxi driver drove holding his camera phone in one hand while keeping that hand on the wheel most of the time. I could not tell for sure, but I assume he was taking pictures as he was driving. On the way back to Beijing, Jason kept having him slow down so he could take pictures, and the taxi driver would take a picture of the same thing.
While we were driving back, we stopped at a small restaurant for lunch. The food was pretty good, but I can say for certain that I had the freshest fish that I have ever had. This one, to be specific:
We were eating outside. Just a couple meters from our table was an artifical pond. After we ordered, someone got a net, went over to the pond, and ran it through the water a few times. She got the fish you can see her reaching for in that photo. She weighed it and asked Jason if 1.18 kilos was okay (he translated, of course). A little bit later, the fish looked like this and was quite tasty:
When we got back to Beijing, we took a bit of down time in the hotel, and then went to dinner at Xi Yu Shi Fu, a Western Chinese restaurant (that is west of China, not Western). The food was more like Middle Eastern food than Chinese food, although there was some of both.
The major attraction of the restaurant is a nightly show. They have a banjo(?) player, someone who my father thinks looks like Bin Laden with a percussion instrument that looked like the top of a drum and he seemed to toss between his hands a few centimeters apart, and four dancers. Here is one of the dancers performing a dance while balancing a stack of bowls on her head:
After dinner, we returned to the hotel and went to sleep.
To be continued…