We were definitely
up earlier this morning (around 5:30 am) and, for the first time in
days, felt so much more refreshed having gotten a pretty good night’s
sleep. I only woke up once to turn off the ghost in the bedside
control pad and accidentally called for the room to be made up after
accidentally turning all the lights in the room on. Although there
were 110 V outlets in our room, there weren’t any grounded outlets
so it was fortunate that I had an adapter to use for my 3 pronged
laptop plug. I caught up for a bit on my blog.
We got to breakfast
at a better time this morning – around 6:45 am. I was particularly
looking forward to trying the noodle soup I had seen on the menu the
day before – it was, so far, my favorite breakfast item on this
trip.
I went back to the
room while Seth went to the ATM to try again with his American
Express card to withdraw some cash. This time it worked and he was
able to withdraw $2000 RMB – about $300 USD for us to use the
remainder of our trip.
We met downstairs in
the lobby at 8 am again and boarded the bus that took us to the
Hutong for our “cultural experience”. We walked for a short
while to an area where we took some individual/group photos between 2
old buildings before going to a local family’s house where we were
split up between 3 groups and took turns practicing Chinese
calligraphy, paper cutting, and knot tying.
Daisy
instructed us on how to write the numbers 1, 2, and 3 then “China”
before she translated each person’s name into Chinese and writing
it with her own personal calligraphy brush. We then moved on to
paper cutting and got to cut out a double happiness character and
were then each gifted a cut out of either a dragon or a phoenix. Our
last station was the knot tying class – this one was definitely the
hardest. Afterwards, we were each given a braided tassel and we
waited for just a bit as our rickshaws arrived.
Each couple boarded
a rickshaw which weren’t just pedal driven these days – they each
had an electric motor so the drivers didn’t work too much to haul
us around. The drive through the Hutongs was pretty extensive and
very interesting. Many of the people who live in the hutongs used
communal bathrooms (“minus 2 stars”). You could tell how wealthy
a family was by how ornate the door to their home was. There were a
surprising number of cars parked in the hutongs as well given how
expensive it is to maintain one.
We re-boarded the
bus and drove about 1.5 hours to the edge of what was still Beijing.
The one thing that was pretty amazing to me during our trip is that
even in what looked like rural parts of the country we still had a decent LTE signal.
It took us about 5
minutes to walk from where the bus dropped us off to the Brickyard
where we had another pre-ordered Western lunch Salad and lotus root
chips were on the table. We had pre-ordered the grilled chicken
sandwich which was good.
A short bus ride and
we were at the welcome center of the Great Wall at the Mutianyu
portion of the wall. Apparently there was some construction going on
and our bus wouldn’t be allowed to get up to the actual entrance so
we got off and walked through a shopping area where we picked up a
magnet for our collection and then boarded a shuttle to the Great
Wall tram.
The walk from the
shuttle up to the tram was pretty long and steep. Once we reached
the tram, we took the stairs up to the loading area – there was
also an elevator option. The 4 of us easily fit into a tram car.
When we got off the tram, we climbed some more steps and all met up
in an open area that was finally the entrance to the actual wall.
You had the option to climb up steps or take a ramp so the group
split up and went up the steps with Ralph or took the ramp with Daisy
where we stopped for individual pictures once we were actually
standing on the wall.
As a group, we all
headed left on the wall and went through our first watch tower then
gathered just outside another watch tower where 2 “soldiers” with
swords came out of the watch tower to give us our pins of the day and
pose for pictures.
It was at this point
that we were told that we had an hour to explore the wall on our own.
It was a pretty warm but hazy day. We’d been to the Badaling
portion of the wall about 15 years ago so this part of the wall was
new for us. Some parts were very steep and there were more stairs
than I remember on the other wall portion but this area was not
nearly as crowded as the section of the wall that’s closest to
Beijing.
We went out past
about 5 or 6 watch towers and reached a section of the wall that was
about 500 stair steps up to the top but ran out of time and turned
around to come back to meet up with our group. One other couple from
our group made it out this far and we were the last to return getting
a nice selfie with our Guides.
We took the tram
back down again and, this time, there was no shuttle so we walked
back down to the shopping area and re-boarded our bus where Daisy
handed out “I Climbed the Great Wall” medals on our way back to
the Peninsula Beijing hotel.
There were more Disney shaped
chocolates and a nice note thanking us for our stay and wishing us a
good trip waiting for us in our room (in Disney script even).
We originally had
dinner reservations at Jing set for 6:30 that Wade changed to 7:30
but by the time we got back to the Peninsula, we were so tired and
sweaty that we decided to cancel dinner and just order room service.
I think a lot of Adventurers did the same thing. We ordered a ribeye
steak (Australian wagyu is what it said) that came with green beans
and french fries which we shared and was just the right amount.
We had a super early
flight the next morning, our Amazing Race Day, so luggage pull was
going to be 10:30 pm tonight. We had our luggage out well before
10:30 and were asleep in no time.
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