TI Imposter
It’s a TI imposter. I know the sign says Beijing Tourist Information but the tourist information that you will get here is the tourist information about the tours and the products that they sell. It’s also a shop where they sell souvenirs that they buy from the market and mark up ten times. These things are all over China and they put them close to the actual places they know tourists go. Such as the train station. Or the Great Wall of China.
Me at Great Wall
It’s me. It’s the Great Wall of China. Not the one at Charleston, WV, the one a Badaling, China. What I hope you take from this picture are the mountains in the background. It seems that the Chinese built their Great Wall in places that were, well, not conducive to easy wall building. Some of the sections of the Great Wall are so steep that a person needs to be part goat to climb up and down them. To be perfectly honest, it really is a "Great Wall" and I’m glad I didn’t have anything to do with the building or maintenance of the wall in anyway. Is it the Eighth Wonder of the World? It’s got my vote simply due to my estimate of how many lives must have been consumed in building and maintaining it.
Mountains at Great Wall
More mountains. More Great Wall. Note that the Great Wall is big enough to stretch across the United States from east to west. Almost twice. This could have been the answer to America’s Civil War. It could still be the answer to our immigration problem. We simply build a wall. Of course that would make it difficult for those who are here illegally to get out, but they should have thought of that before they came here.
Dining Family Style – China Tour
Yes, that’s me in the picture. We’re all dining Chinese family style. What happens is that a multitude of dishes are brought to the table and everyone helps themselves. Not such a problem, until you realize there are no serving spoons or utensils. Then you realize that everyone is using the same chopsticks that they’re eating with to get the food off of the serving dish. I would have liked to ask if anyone had seen any serving spoons, but I couldn’t really get my point across to my Chinese hosts. Someday, I predict a serious outbreak of some type of virus in China.
Tickets – Foreign People
I know the Chinese do not have spell or grammar checkers. How do I know this? It’s as plain as the sign in front of my nose. Now don’t think that this sign is for foreign people only or that it means that this window is for foreign people only. It’s a line for a ticket window where they have a person at the end of the line who supposedly speaks English. Or some other foreign language. Maybe Russian. Maybe Vietnamese. Who knows. But, they’re communication skills are guaranteed to be bad. It’s also the line every Chinese person knows is the easiest in which to take "cuts" because foreign people can’t really believe there is no queuing in China. What his line is tends to be a lesson in frustration.
Chinese Apts
These are some Chinese apartments that I saw when I was on the top of the wall. I got to see a lot of them. They vary in size, condition and amenities, just like everywhere else. I wouldn’t want to live in some of them. Some of them look really nice.
Top of the Wall
The wall is huge. It’s 8.5 miles around. I rented a bicycle for $3. One of the pedals fell off of the first bicycle I rented. I tried to get the attendant to adjust the seat on the second one so that I could get a little leg extension. I think he told me take a flying leap in Chinese.
Up the Wall
The ticket to get into the gate to go up onto the city wall cost me 40 yuan, about $$6. No one told me there was a charge just to get up on the wall. I was a little surprised. Everyone told me that I had to pay 20 yuan, $3, to rent a bicycle for 90 minutes. This picture is a picture of the stairs leading to the top of the wall. The wall is a really big place. I have read where it is the largest city wall in the world. However, I looked up the number of walled cities in the world and the list was overwhelming. There is no way I would want to research all of the walled cities of the world.
Inside the Bus
Usually, I can get a really good position in the bus right behind the driver. I’ve noticed that the Chinese, in general, do not like to ride in the front of anything that moves such as subway trains, cars and buses. I attributed it to their fear of crashing in a vehicle. Dale Earnhardt, the aren’t. Then again, maybe Dale should have taken a clue from the Chinese and been a little more afraid of crashing. Anyway, I wish I could have gotten some better shot so the bus being about 2 inches off of the bumper of someone else. The Chinese have a style of driving to which I couldn’t become accustomed. In my opinion, they’re simply really, really bad drivers. To elaborate, let me tell you that, as someone who drives a Big Rig, I’ve met drivers in America from Russia, Easter Europe, Africa, Mexico, Central America, South America, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. The Aussies don’t drive in the U.S. because the make too much money back home. But, I’ve never met a Chinese trucker in America. I’d never thought about that before I came to China. I realized that one day when I was in a parking lot watching a bunch of guys with big, shiny, expensive cars try to parallel park. I thought to myself that they could never drive a Big Rig and it was then that I realized I’d never seen a Chinese drive one.
Big Goose Pagoda
The Big Goose Pagoda is hard to miss. It stands in a large landscaped park which means that it doesn’t have to compete with other buildings for your attention. At seven large levels, the pagoda has some stature to it. Built in the middle of the 7th century, the pagoda must have been awe-inspiring in it’s day. Heck, it’s awe-inspiring today. The surrounding park is simply a wonderful manifestation of a crew of groundskeepers who obviously like their jobs and are skilled at them. I thing I may have been more taken with the area surrounding the pagoda than with the pagoda itself.
