Great Wall!

I just spent the past 15 minutes bawling my eyes out because I just realized I had my camera set on the lowest pixel count, to save memory. WHY DID I DO THAT? That means ALL of the pictures I took of our fun-filled, SCENERY rich weekend were basically taken with the equivalent of a kodak disposable camera. Why would an 8MP camera even have a 0.3MP setting?!?!?! Yeah, it's that bad. Not even a single megapixel... At least Chris had his mega nice camera and I was able to upload his photos to my computer. Still, I think I took double the amount of pictures he did and it is just a huge disappointment that they came out so grainy. =( Huge fail.

Chris is being so nice about it. He keeps saying the pictures look fine, they look nice. It's just that the pictures aren't of any sights here in Beijing. The place we went to was not even where most of the tourists go when they go see the Great Wall. I found this other village for us to go to, in the North East where less tourists go and where parts of the wall are less restored (read: more authentic). If I wanted nice, crisp, clear pictures of ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, I would have this place at the top of that list. This is just so disappointing.

Anyway, I will try to remain upbeat as I go through our weekend. I will try to upload mostly Chris's pictures since they came out so much better. At least we have those...

Getting to this place was an adventure in itself, since it was off the beaten path. We ended up taking a public bus about halfway there, to the city of Miyun. The public bus left from downtown Beijing, about a 20 minute subway ride from where we live. That part was pretty seamless. When we got there we had to hire a "minibus" to take us to the wall at Jinshanling, which was another 60km. We saw no minibuses so there were a bunch of gypsy cab drivers and after much negotiation, which involved an old Chinese woman nearby who spoke decent English and could help us communicate with the drivers, we found a guy to take us for 230RMB, which is kind of a lot of money. But at that point we knew we needed to get up there and didn't want to mess around.

The drive up there was incredibly nerve wracking. The majority of the time we were on this one-lane one each side highway, which was a bit wider than typical American roads like that. It was wide for a reason -- the whole idea of waiting before you pass someone until you can see far enough ahead to determine no one is coming in the opposite direction is not really a "thing" here. The cars were going three wide easy, sometimes close to four wide at times. I was very nervous in the car on that road.

When we got up to Jinshanling, we checked into our hotel. The hotel was right at the foot of the entrance to the wall and it was the only hotel and only restaurant really around.

Here is the courtyard where our little room was...


Here is me in the walkway of the hotel...



When we got in on Sunday afternoon, it was about 4pm so we just relaxed and had an early dinner and went to bed early. There was a television in the room but it didn't work so we went to sleep very early to get a head start on our day.



Here was our "Western" breakfast, aka slightly toasted bread, over easy eggs, spam, sliced cucumber, jam, and tomatoes..



Here was a guy at breakfast who was taking so many pictures of the wall mural of the Great Wall, we were debating whether it even made sense for him to go up to the wall at all...






Here was the first view we saw when we walked up the many stairs to get to the wall for the first time.




Here are just some general pictures of the us and the wall:















































Here is a series of pictures showing the steepest section of the wall we experienced. It felt like a 20-story building. Part of the steepness did not even have stairs; you just had to walk up a very steep incline and not fall backwards. The steep incline is the lower part; the top part of the first picture is just stairs. When we got to the top, I knew the only way back was to go back down and I was freaking out at the idea of knowing we still had to go back down. This isn't like, afraid I might slip and sprain my ankle, this was afraid of slipping and DYING. Needless to say we were about two towers away from the end of the line so I suggested we start heading back since I knew I would not be able to enjoy myself knowing what we were facing.



























It was incredible how many old people were there, even PASSING us on those steep stairs. Small children were making the trek, as well. It was remarkable. Here is our attempt at "discreetly" trying to take a photo of one of the oldsters...






And of course there were crazy women wearing HEELS climbing the wall:







Instead of waking up early to watch the sunrise over the wall, we stayed on the wall all day and watched the sunset. Chris took a couple of pictures but I took a TON, all of which look so crappy... Ugh =( Here are some of both of ours..
















































We went to bed early again on Monday night after a late dinner since we were exhausted from hiking on the wall all day. We got up early again Tuesday for another round of our Western breakfast and our taxi to Miyun left at 10am. We spent some of the morning shopping for souvenirs but that was not even enjoyable -- there were about 10 booths of vendors selling pretty much the same souvenirs and they all PESTERED you without end if they thought you were going to buy something. We tried pitting them against one another to get the lowest prices and it worked. I am even one who enjoys the negotiation process but geez, this kind of shopping was not even fun. They were too aggressive. So we got what we needed and headed out back to Beijing!

Here was our view from the taxi to Miyun:



Now we are back in Beijing and we are exhausted! I feel a bit better about the picture debacle after seeing all of the great pictures Chris has. At least we have those. And his camera is really great so they came out even better than my camera would have taken. I did upload some of my more grainy pictures here so see if you can see which are which =)