The Great Wall, Beijing

I couldn't live on this side of the world and not see the Great Wall of China! My friends were planning to spend a 3 day weekend in February seeing the sights of Beijing and asked me to join them. My first reaction, "it is going to be cold in February." As you can see, I am not missing the bitter New England winters. I decided to toughen up, pack my fleece and fly to Beijing for Valentine's Day weekend with a family of 4, how romantic.

The guide, Konglin, met me at the airport and brought me staight to the Summer Palace (I arrived earlier than my friends). It was a sunny day, probably about 45 F, not as bad as it could have been. The guide was low-key, knowledgeable and spoke English well. On the way to the the Summer Palace, we stopped to see some Olympic highlights (see the pictures). The Summer Palace was once a summer retreat for the emperor. It is now open to the public and is more like a park spread out over 10 square miles. It is an amazing property on Kunming Lake with temples, mansions and bridges. We climbed many stairs to get up to see the Tower of Buddhist Incense on the palace property.

I couldn't live on this side of the world and not see the Great Wall of China!

Konglin then took me back to the Regent Hotel (very nice) in the center of Beijing. I had made plans to meet up for dinner with a friend of my HK principal. She called me at the hotel and had her driver pick me up and bring me out to their suburb. They teach at the International School of Beijing. We went to their local pizza pub and had a nice time chatting with other international teachers. When I got back to the hotel, my friends had arrived at the hotel.

Saturday morning, Konglin picked us all up at the hotel to take us out to a section of the Great Wall. He brought us to a popular tourist part of the wall called Mutianyu. At this location, we were able to take a cable car up to the wall, hike as long as we liked, then slide down! This was a great option since we were traveling with two girls, 9 and 7 years old. It was colder on Saturday and we appreciated that the sun was shining while hiking the Wall.  The Wall was built during the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644) is runs over 373 miles and contains about 827 city wall platforms, 71 passes and countless towers. It's hard to comprehend the labor involved to build this little Wall!

On the way back to Beijing, Konglin brought us to an excellent dim sum restaurant for a late lunch. We had our own private dining room and the food was excellent. We made one more stop at a Cloisonne factory. I had no idea how complicated this metal/enamel art form was! We got to see a little bit of each stage of the process. After that adventure, Patrick and the girls went back to the hotel to swim in the pool, while Nancy and I went back into Bejing Center to see what the Pearl Market was all about. It was quite overwhelming! It is a big mall with stall after stall of every imaginable pearl! We settled on one stall, bought some gifts and then headed out. I ended that day with some time in the hotel steam room and sauna.

On Sunday, it was even colder and my South Carolina friends were hitting their cold tolerance at the Forbidden city. The Forbidden City, called Gu Gong in Chinese, was the imperial palace during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Now known as the Palace Museum, it is to the north of Tiananmen Square. Rectangular in shape, it is the world's largest palace complex and covers 74 hectares. Surrounded by a six meter deep moat and a ten meter high wall are 9,999 rooms. The wall has a gate on each side. With the cold temperature being a factor, as well as not having a guide at this sight, I must admit we raced through the historic property. In the end, we spent just the right amount of time there because it took us a very long time to flag down a taxi. No one seemed to want to go in the direction we were going, or they didn't want to take 5 people. We don't know for sure why it was so difficult because not many people speak English in Beijing, not like in Hong Kong. We really felt like tourists in this city.

We finally got a taxi, raced back to the hotel, got our luggage and headed for the airport. It was an action-packed weekend in Beijing! Back to school on Monday...