Beijing

Day 5

The GREAT Wall of China!  And the Ming Tombs

So one of my life goals is to stand on the Great Wall of China, I did it! I completed it on December 10, 2010.  It was freezing and very windy and to my amazement it wasn’t as tall or huge as I had thought it would be. However, in Chinese it is actually called the Long wall of china.   It took as a few tries to find a bus that would not lie to us and give a reasonable price.  They were telling us that it if we wanted to get there in an hour it would cost us 120 RMB a person, but if we wanted to take the slow one it would take 3 hours and be 12 RMB.  It was very frustrating at how much they were trying to rip us off, but we finally hoped on a bus that cost us 12 RMB for each of us and only took us an hour to get there. 

Along the way…

My first few glances of the wall

So we were getting closer to the wall and there was a stop that Landon thought we wanted to get off of.  Turns out it was a stop too early that had a very pricey animal park and a rundown, not-open museum and another mile and a half walk till we got to the Great Wall. 

Picture of the animal park…

We made it!! 

Look how steep it is… and yes the Chinese always wear heels for hikes!! I will never understand.

The 13 Ming Tombs

After my excursion to the Great Wall we planned on going to the Ming Tombs, but would have to get off at a stop and find another bus at a different stop to take us.  I was freezing and was not in the best of moods and starving; we had to walk a little ways and stopped at the first restaurant.  At the restaurant we just happened to see the bus that we wanted to catch.  We hoped on and to the Ming Tombs we went. 

The sketch map of the 13 tombs. 

We decided to go to the Dingling Tomb.

Our hike to the underground Palace

I'm guessing that the sign didn't work

Underground

(The picture turned out blurry, but it was the only one of the tombs)

We tried to do some jumping pictures… and about the 10^th try for me to take the picture I got one!

Lastly a really cool tree that Landon had to take a picture of

Beijing

Day 3

Landon had to fly back to Shenzhen to do some work and took the camera with him.  So I wondered around Beijing and went back to Silk Street. I went to the mall and bought a few souvenirs. 

Day 4

We started our day out by going to all of the Olympic  sites and toured around there for a little bit.  There were not many people there and the place has not been kept up since the Olympics. 

Here is a picture of the underwater walkway that we thought was going to be cool. 

The Bird’s Nest, all of these sites were extremely expensive to get in to so we didn’t go inside. 

The Ice Cube

Here is a picture of the classic split pants that all of the little kids wear. 

Some of the funny signs telling people to not walk on the grass.

We then took the subway over to the Temple of Heaven and only had 30 minutes to look around.