September 6 (Sunday) – Beijing

Today we are going to the Great Wall. The Great Wall was quite a climb and there were a lot of tourists out… both Chinese and Westerners. Paul went all the way to the top of the section we were at (~3200 stairs, round trip). Paul’s calves were sore for two days. Little did we know that this was just a warm up for stair climbing. I went about 2/3rds of the way…partially because of concerns about the knee while coming down. I didn’t want to blow out the knee on the first day of a 30 day vacation. The views were spectacular…we could see across the valley with a bird’s eye view of another section of the wall. The sky was overcast and gray, as it was for most of the trip.

  

Next we stopped at a Cloisonné factory (an itinerary add-on) and saw a demonstration of the manufacturing process. They make the form (vase or whatever) out of copper, copper wire is used to make a pattern on the form and then the areas made by the wire are filled in with many layers of paint. The piece is then fired and polished. It’s a pretty intricate process that is very labor intensive. This factory had only a few workers. The main production is done at much larger factories elsewhere. The main purpose of this small operation was to get us into a huge showroom with an almost infinite variety of items for sale (both cloisonné and other Chinese crafts). I hadn’t intended to buy anything but ended up getting a lovely blue vase with wisteria flowers for me and lots of Christmas presents.

The next stop was the Summer Palace which included a huge man made lake (and a mountain made from the materials excavated to make the lake). There was a large “boat” pavilion in the lake made entirely of marble and a 728 meter long covered walkway that ran along the lake.
 

 

Getting back to the hotel was a major challenge. Many of the roads were blocked due to rehearsals for the upcoming 60^th anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. At one point the intersection was blocked for an extended period of time while hundreds (or maybe it was thousands) of ceremony participants in pastel colored rain slickers and pulling brightly covered suitcases crossed the intersection heading somewhere. We finally got to within a block of the hotel, unloaded in the middle of the intersection and walked the rest of the way…a little adventure.