The Great Wall is just cool. You may ask – how cool can just a wall be? Pretty darn cool when you consider it stretches over 5000 miles and took over 1600 years to complete. The construction for the Wall began in 212 BC. Our country is in such it’s infancy compared to China. They say that it cost one life for every brick laid. The thought put in to building the structure is pretty amazing too. The floor of the Wall always tilts south back towards Beijing. They wanted to make sure all valuable resources like rain fell on Chinese soil and not Mongolian. The ruggedness of the land on which the structure was built adds to its luster. Overall, it was a really great experience.
Prior going to the Great Wall, we stopped at a jade market and had lunch in a local restaurant. The food (pic below) as all been pretty good and never without surplus. Basically, they load food up on the lazy susan and you eat until stuffed. We can not eat fresh fruits and vegetables which is killing me. I have gotten use to eating a touch lighter than we have thus far. I am sure we will all be craving something familiar like a cheeseburger pretty soon.
I actually got the see a ghost city (pic below) on our ride out to the Great Wall. The site was roughly an hour outside Beijing in the middle of no where. The facility had roughly 15 building probably 20-25 stories high in varying arrays of completion. At this point, the site is basically empty with no future plans to complete the project. This is one example of the debt fueled boom in China that has some experts worried about their economy.
Tomorrow, we will visit the Hutong neighborhood of Beijing. This is one of the oldest in the city and known for their neat alleyways. Afterwords, we will dine in a local’s home which should be interesting. At the end of the day, we travel pretty late to our next destination in Xian. I might not be able to update tomorrow night as it could be late before we get settled.
The Patrick Family 