Beijing Ruminations

We are now in the hands of tour guides. A first for me. Our guides are two very pleasant and enjoyable people. They are full of knowledge and helpful in all sorts of ways that make this trip a lot easier. We all like them very much. Nuse, from Hunan is with us for the entire trip. He, working with Jill, put the trip together for us. Helen, the other guide, is from Beijing and will be with us only in Beijing. I wonder if each city will involve a local guide in addition to Nuse? Having a guide, besides making every thing easier, also means we go to places like the cloissenne factory which is a government run show room for tourists to encourage them to spend money. Later on we will be going to a couple of "embroidery teaching institutes" with the expectation that we will spend money. I for one could sit these ones out

Beijing is a huge, very smoggy city. The new construction going up is everywhere and wonderful to see. There are some very striking and unusual buildings going up. The traffic is really bad.
It seems we are in one traffic jam after another.

Yesterday was a very full day. Perhaps a bit too full.

We started off right after breakfast for the Great Wall. It is much more impressive than I though it would be, stretching for miles up and down mountains. Being on it involves climbing or clambering up the never ending steps. It is hard work. The Wall literally is going up and down mountains. Of course, Jim and the boys raced up the hill and traveled a long distance along the Wall, Joy and the girls weren't slouches either. I got up to the first outpost (pictured above with Clay in the forground) and was pleased with myself. We all agreed that we would have liked to have spent more time there. (photo)

We left The Great Wall to have lunch at the Cloissenne factory mentioned above. After shopping a zillion pieces of cloissenne we left for the Tombs of the Ming Emporers- or, at least one in particular. It was beautiful and I, for one, loved wandering though it. Jim, who had had the experience of seeing the Forbidden City already thought we would be bored by it but
we weren't. (Though Jim regretted the nice weather there not being available to us for Tianan'men or Temple of Heaven, but more on that later.)

After we went for dinner of "a taste of Peking Duck" at a place that I suspect is a bit of a tourist trap . The food was good and they did include Peking Duck which was carved at the table. In the process of going between the Ming Tombs and dinner we drove around the Olympic
games area which included the "bird's nest" stadium that we have so many photos of. I actually wasn't that impressed with the other architecture in the park. There is a lot more exciting architecture around Beijing.

Last, it was the Peking Acrobat Show. (A sign of our difference of opinion: Dick put this out of his mind. Jim enjoyed it thoroughly. Dick thought it was too reminiscent of the Ed Sullivan show from his youth.) The acrobatics in question did not involve trapeze, but did involve various feats of agility, balance and strength.