Tuesday, July 15 Today we started with another lovely breakfast cooked by our B&B host. We left feeling nourished for the exciting Great Wall adventure we had planned. We used the local bus system to get there (as opposed to the tourist buses) and still feel quite accomplished by this fact; we even made it onto a special speedy bus.
We went to the Badaling section of the wall. We climbed and climbed. We did the side with crazy steep undulations first. Jeannette stayed strong throughout, though Josh was worried for a bit about his not-so-athletic wife. We should also mention that Jeannette did the climb in flips. This concerned Josh greatly, but Jeannette had blisters from walking in wet shoes yesterday. She felt quite confidant in her 4 years of San Diego flips training, and has previous flips experience running a mountain forest in Bulgaria on her resume to support her claim of flips as valid footwear for the day. The flips served her well on the Great Wall climb.
The guidebooks all say that Badaling is the most touristy, but this super hilly part of Badaling had just a nice sprinkling of people. The other portion of Badaling we did second was nuts, but in a fun way. And all the tourists were Chinese, which made us feel like we were experiencing something more authentic than super touristy (though the Disneyland-esque theme park feel you have to navigate through to get to the wall at all in the first pace is unnerving). We got some amazing photos all along the climb, then decided to take our life in our hands and ride the “sliding car” down the mountain side, as we couldn’t readily tell how to get off the mountain without redoing every undulation again. Plus, all our Chinese tourist comrades were doing it and if they were going to ride in a rickety old amusement park ride that burns brake rubber down the side of a sheer cliff, so were we. Needless to say, it was the most dangerous thing we’ve done so far on the trip, but there’s still time and Jeannette still hasn’t had the fried-lamb-on-a-stick-street-food she wants that even Josh is afraid of… When we made it down the mountain, lives intact, we took our bus back to Beijing.
We walked back to our hutong to document it with photos and went to Passby Bar for an amazing dinner and then we accidentally drank 1.75 L of beer. It’s awkward for us to order beer by the milliliter and we were surprised when Josh’s beer came in a pitcher. Though now, we want to try to find a pitcher like that to buy. We took some nighttime shots of the hutong and did some more shopping. We bought a nice tea set. We’ll have to see if it makes it home in one piece.
Then we had the stressful job of packing our shopping and combining our stuff into manageable bags. We are excited for the rest of our trip but we loved Beijing and our hutong and our B&B and are a little sad to be leaving. Josh is especially sad to be leaving his home of 5 weeks. Tomorrow we leave for Datong.
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Tags: Beijing
I am loving the blog! Thanks for keeping it so informative. Please…Jeannette, be careful! You are not immortal. Sorry, Mom’s can’t help it.
Love you both,
Mom
Wow. This is great. Good work on the blog so far. I’m very impressed.
Your trip sounds like great fun and a little like National Geographic Explorer only without commercial interuptions.
Wow. This is great. Good work on the blog so far. I’m very impressed.
Your trip sounds like great fun, a little like National Geographic Explorer only without commercial interuptions.
Yay for the flips Jeannette!! Bring the SD to the Wall.