Tue 01/07/08 04:20

I just got back from my day trip and have a few hours before I leave to see the Chinese Acrobats. I don’t know if I’ll have internet access for awhile after today, so I thought it would be a good idea to post and do more if I get the chance.

Today was a blast.

We started this morning at 6am to make it to the Great Wall at 9. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I slept for the majority of the ride. I never really got a sense of how large Beijing actually is until this morning. We drove for two hours and we were still in the city, it wasn’t until the last hour that we started to see mountains and rural China.

In some ways the part of the wall that we went to was something like an amusement park, not a lot of people but different things to do. For example, most of us took the cable car up to the last quarter of the climb. I’m not sure of the full distance but my guess is that it’s about 3 or 4 miles if you hike the full distance, the cable car shortened it to about a half mile or mile. The last part though was almost completely straight up.

After walking around and taking pics we started down. It’s hard to explain how beautiful the scenery is from the top of the mountain, some straight out of postcards… but real. As you can see from the photos it was foggy when we first got there, but cleared a little later on. In total we were on the wall for about an hour.

There are three ways to get down, you can hike, take the cable car, or take a zip line down. Four of us decided to take the zip line. I filmed on my video camera on the way down, but I won’t be able to post it until I get back to Dubai. Anyway it was fun, they put the harness on you, clip you on to the wire, and then a lady says “sit down.” The next thing I knew I was zipping along at about thirty miles per hour about 2 hundred feet over a river. What I liked about it, is that there wasn’t time to over-think the situation, it just happened in seconds.

After The Great Wall we went to the silk/pearl market. It’s basically a large building where vendor buy small spaces to sell their stuff. There’s a lot of junk, and lots of good things to look at. You really have to imagine it. First the keyword is “hello.” This is how they get your attention, and it works. Then if you stop they grab your arm. I wrote about this in the post where I went to the Oriental Plaza, to give you an idea, one of the guys in our group has a bruise where one of the girls grabbed him– They really latch on. Anyway, I really love the whole transaction process. They start at an incredibly high price, and if you play with them a little you can get it down by four-fifths… at least that’s the furthest I could get them down.

There was two girls working in this one shop that really had my number, they were cute, and they knew it. It’s almost embarassing how well they worked at getting me to buy something, if I didn’t know what they were doing and having a blast during the whole process I probably would have hung my head in shame. Here’s how it unfolded. One of the girls started with the “hello.” She was cute so I kind of started talking to her. Then she started complimenting me, and asked if I could see what I was carrying, then she wouldn’t give it back. When I held out my hand for her to hand it to me, she held my hand. So there I was bartering with one girl while holding the hand of the other one. Now you have to realize they were both cute, so I enjoyed it. When they thought that they had me (which they did) they started teasing me that they were talking so much to me that now they needed ice creams. :) Can you imagine, they asked for ice cream… so I did what any self respecting middle-aged guy would do when he’s been holding the hand of a pretty girl, I went and got them both an ice cream.

Don’t laugh… If I thought I could do it, I would have stayed there with them until the place closed. I even thought about trying to get email addresses, but I figured that they work all the older guys the same way, and then I would have really been embarrassed.

Later I got propositioned by an older woman. I couldn’t believe it, she called me over and asked where I was going. I told her and then she pointed to me, and then to herself and waited for my response. First time that has ever happened.