On Monday Kimmy and our Driver pulled up bright and early for another big day. We were headed to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall!
We drove way out of the city to visit the Sacred Way and the tombs. The amazing thing was that even that far out there was still so much pollution! It was not like our first day in Beijing at all. I couldn't stop sneezing.
The sacred way was a long paved avenue lined with many, many, MANY stone statues...
...and the kids wanted their picture taken with all of them!
And the Chinese wanted their picture taken with the kids. The worst is when an entire tour group would line up for their turn for a picture. This would have been way cool if I could have charged them money but I couldn't so after a few shots we just had to walk away.
Each animal had a match across the way and then the next pair of animals would be that same kind of animal but standing.
Cool stone carving at the tombs.
We always play the game "win, fail or meh" in our family, and to be honest the tombs were a "meh". They're just not that exciting. So I entertained myself by taking pictures of some signs with fabulous English translations:
It LOOKS sunny and nice in these pictures but it was smoggy and foul. You can see it better in the video and when we took that we were even farther away from the city!
After the tombs Kimmy took us to a Jade museum/carving place/tourist trap. This ship was amazing. It had chains all over it carved out of jade. Jeff told the kids "be really careful because if you break anything you don't go to college". I was impressed that Teddy didn't start breaking things on purpose after that.
We drove about an hour and finally arrived at the Great Wall. We went to the Mutianyu section of the wall which is farther out but less swarmed by tourists so that was great. We took a ski lift up to the wall.
It was AMAZING! Hard to imagine anyone walking the whole thing let alone building it.
We hiked out until we hit a section that hadn't been restored yet and was off-limits.
I had no idea how STEEP some parts of the Wall are!
My 2 little adventurers. They whined a bit about how far Mom and Dad wanted to hike on the Great Wall of China. So we used the time to tell them all about it's history and why it was built.
So of course then it was time for an historical re-enactment. In this photo the part of the Mongol Horde is played by Dad and Teddy while the surprised Chinese guards are played by Sasha and Mom.
Cool guard-towers every couple of segments:
Wow!
It really is pretty darn incredible.
Then it was time to go down. We rode these cool toboggan things in a metal track all the way down to the base. It was a blast!
We were at the Wall all afternoon. When we left we had about a 2 hour drive back into Beijing all the way to this epic train station:
Kimmy led us through a maze of levels and then back outside and then into the main entrance. He gave us our tickets and showed us where to go to wait for our train and then it was time to say good-bye.
We ate dinner at the station, used a bathroom that makes the ones in Grand Central look like surgically disinfected jewels, and then our train arrived. We were off to Xi-'an!
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