Today our main activity was a trip to the great wall. This truly is an amazing site. There are many different segments of the wall that can be visited – we went to the Mutianyu section. This part of the wall originally was built during the Ming dynasty, about 600 years ago, and was restored in modern times.

The drive itself was interesting in that it was our only view of rural China. We went by small villages with old buildings and narrow streets, having courtyards piled high with Chinese cabbage being dried for future use. As we got into the mountains, the area started to remind me of the Catskills, i.e. a mountain weekend getaway for city folks. There were small resorts and riverside restaurants, and the area apparently is very popular with Beijing residents who want a taste of the rural life.

At the parking lot for the great wall, we found dozens of tour buses. Our guide had told us that this was the less-visited part of the wall, so we were surprised to see so many tourists. Once we were on the wall, we had no idea where all those people were – while there certainly were other tourists, it didn’t feel crowded.

We took the cable car (like a ski gondola) to the top. You can walk up on a trail, which I would have preferred, but we didn’t have time. Instead, we took an hour-long walk on the top of the wall. You walk along a relatively wide path on the top of the wall, passing through watchtowers every few hundred yards. The wall runs along the ridge of the mountain so that the soldiers can see out both sides. They looked out over a beautiful view of craggy mountains that seems to go on forever. It helped that we also had gorgeous weather. The wall continues on in both directions as far as you can see, for thousands of miles.

It was hard to imagine the building of this wall, which took about a million people. It also was hard to imagine the life of the soldiers living here – how they were provisioned, how they kept warm, how they kept their sanity.

I should note that coming and going to the wall also requires you to go through Souvenir City, a group of stalls with aggressive shop people hawking their wares. In spite of them all saying “t-shirts, one dollar”, Lenny couldn’t convince them to actually sell him one for a dollar.

After a country lunch featuring chicken with chestnuts and roasted local fish, we stopped at a cloisonné factory. This is the art technique of creating patterns on copper using copper wire, filling it in with enamel paint, firing and polishing. The end results are brightly colored and richly patterned objects. I realized I had some faint recollection of my childhood from seeing these pieces – perhaps my parents had brought back some cloisonné pieces from one of their trips when I was young (mom/dad, well?).

We were supposed to go from here to see a Ming tomb, but we four caucused and decided to change plans. We had heard of a contemporary art area in Beijing that we otherwise would not get to see, so we asked our guide to take us there instead. This kind of change is one of the advantages of individual travel instead of group travel!

The area is called 798 and is near the Beijing airport. It consists of a bunch of factories and workshops that have been converted into artist studios and galleries. The area was very lively in that it was the end of the day, and many people were moving around as they prepared to leave for the day. The area also is full of small cafes.

It was a little hard to figure out the good places to go, and our guide didn’t seem to know it that well, but it still was fun to just wander in and out of the shops and galleries. There was a real hodge-podge, from weavers showing traditional dress to high resolution photographs of Chinese factories, to avant-garde sculpture and painting. Lenny and I thoroughly enjoyed the visit and could have imagined spending several hours there. Both Lenny and Galina pointed out that they could not imagine such freedom of expression in the old Communist days.

For dinner, we went to Club Lan, which is known for its eclectic design by Phillip Stark as well as its good food. The strangest part of the décor was that the ceilings were full of randomly sized, framed paintings hung in random patterns. All the light fixtures were different, as were the chairs and chargers. The place was a bit reminiscent of Bucks Restaurant in Woodside, but far more elegant!

-- Donna