China: Walkin' the Wall

To continue my China narrative: Sunday morning I met up with a good friend from college, and she took me to the Summer Palace. The emperors used summer palace as a main palace, or an alternate palace to use for vacation since it is surrounded by a beautiful park with a lake in the middle. Once again, it was very crowded so we didn’t spend a lot of time exploring the main buildings in the center of the palace, but we walked around the grounds a lot. The flowers were blooming and most the trees have leaves on them now, so it was beautiful. We climbed up to the Tower of Buddhist Incense, a tall temple on a mountain with great views. The Summer Palace has lots of traditional architecture, including a round bridge and the infamous marble boat. According to one legend, a queen who wanted to be emperor wanted to be on the water but didn’t like boats, so she essentially built a stone dock that looks like a boat. According to another (non-so-interesting) tradition, it was a tribute to the navy.
After thoroughly exploring the gardens, we enjoyed a delicious Chinese meal and hung out at her apartment. It was great to catch up after almost 2 years of not seeing each other! We had dinner with several other people from college who also teach there, and it was crazy how many of them I knew, either from living in the dorms, different classes, or even my job grading engineering papers! It was a lot of fun to see them again and hear about what they are doing, and the meal of Dai food (an ethnic group in southern China) was excellent. Chinese food is definitely at the top of my list of favorite foods (along with Thai).
The next day I hung out with the friends I was staying with, playing with the kids and looking around the neighborhood. After lunch, three of us took the bus 2 hours up to the Badaling section of the Great Wall. The wall is absolutely incredible… it stretches along forever, snaking up and down along the top of the mountains, and this section curves around so the wall surrounds you in almost every direction. They say when the Great Wall was built they connected lots of existing walls, especially around the cities, and built new sections until it eventually stretched almost all the way across China from the desert to the ocean. It was originally built of stones and earth to keep out invaders from the north. This section was a good hike since the wall is really steep; at times you walk on ramps and at times steps, some so steep they are almost like a ladder. Every so often there is a watchtower that the wall goes through. You can’t go on forever since it hasn’t been rebuilt all the way and is broken down, but we spent a couple hours on the wall. Fortunately, in the afternoon after a holiday there were not many people there, and it was kind of a medium day as far as visibility is concerned; not bad but not great either. As the sun started to sink down, it got a little clearer and the wall looked more golden. I was so happy I finally got to see it! Now I can die happy :^)
I left Tuesday afternoon, after spending the morning with our friends in the area they live in and getting lunch on the street at the morning market. It was very nice and encouraging to spend a lot of time with them, and I had a lot of fun with their kids too. I consider this trip my real spring break since my other one wasn’t real relaxing. This one was a good balance between seeing tourist things and spending time with people I hadn’t seen for a long time.
As far as thoughts on Beijing go, I was amazed at how nice a lot of the city of Beijing is; it has lots of trees, a lot of the buildings are modern, and it is kept up decently well for Asia. Complements of the Olympics, probably, but I enjoyed it. [Speaking of the olympics, I didn't have time to see the famous olympic buildings, but I did see the Belodrome where they had bike racing, and also the torch/dragon tower people stayed in.] It was a fair amount warmer than Korea, even though it is farther north (one of the great mysteries of life), but it is very dry and dusty now and I constantly had junk coating my throat. It was also interesting to see how it was similar and different to Korea and Korean culture after living in Asia for a while. I'm putting a lot of pictures up… I took a lot more good ones, so if you want to see more pictures of my trip, ask me in person and I’ll show you them!