Our first stop in Beijing was a jade “museum.” Truthfully, this was the commercial equivalent of the carpet stores we saw in Turkey, but it was interesting and I learned to tell good jade from imitation (the higher the ring tone when you clink it, the better the jade). I bought 2 Chinese zodiac stamps – the year of the Snake for me and the year of the Rabbit for Bruce (fits out personalities, doesn’t it??). An artist carved our names in Chinese characters in the bottom – quite a delicate feat since jade is technically a stone and the stamps were only about a half-inch square.
Traffic here is absolutely horrendous as you would imagine in a city with a population 7 times larger than Chicago. Our local guide told us they have a unique policy to try to cut down on traffic congestion. Everyone is assigned a number (1 through 7), so that one day a week you are not allowed to take your car on the road. You can carpool, ride your bike, or take public transportation, but you can’t drive your own car. Of course, she told us affluent people with 2 cars just leave one at home and hop into the other.
Our next stop was the Great Wall, probably the most well-known monument most people visit when coming to China. It wasn’t quite what I expected, however, because from all the pictures I’ve ever seen, I thought the Great Wall was a massive stone structure you walked along the top of ... WRONG!
You have to climb up and up, hundreds of steps, to go from watchtower to watchtower (what a workout). Of course eventually you have to climb down hundreds of steps if you want to go completely around the wall (kind of like a roller coaster profile with peaks and valleys), but we didn’t have time for that. The steps are very uneven as you would expect for an ancient hand-built stone structure, but the views were breathtaking when we got to the top. It was kind of cool to think that just on the other side of the wall is Mongolia.
Next we went to the Ming Dynasty Tombs. Thirteen emperors were buried in this area. The roadway leading in (called Spirit Way) is lined with exotic animal statues. We got to take our first boat ride in a Dragon Boat.
