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Wanshang hao!
Oh boy! Oh boy oh boy oh boy! What a monumental day! This is Stop #1 on my quest to see the Wonders of the World: the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China! It’s about an hour and a half north of Beijing in a quiet, rural area, unlike the more famous and more crowded Badaling section. You think you know what to expect from the wall, since it appears in so many pictures, but once you catch a glimpse of the jagged mountains that it covers, you can’t help but let your jaw drop a little at the site of the massive dragon’s back! At 5,500 miles in length, I started to understand why the Chinese word for “dragon” is long!
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I jumped right up on the railing to see if I could spot George, but I lost my balance and tumbled off the Great Wall into the bushes below! Luckily, the only damage was to my dignity, so, after hauling myself back up, I settled down and joined the rest of the group all along the watchtowers. I thought we would be able to visit all twenty-three of them, but those steps are a lot steeper than they appear from the ground! Plus, the brown air made my lungs hurt before I got halfway up the first big staircase! George was nowhere to be seen!
Despite that, and even though Shine only gave us two hours on the Wall, those were the most amazing two hours of my life so far! Before we left, I made sure to touch the bricks with my paws. It is good, when you aren’t going to break anything, to touch pieces of history. That makes it all the more real. Just don’t be disrespectful like the millions of people who carved their names into the bricks. May they all step in baby poop in the streets of Beijing!
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On the way down, after receiving compliments from two Australian ladies and a request from a Japanese family to take their picture, we took the gondola down and landed at the start of a cramped tunnel of vendors. Now, the vendors by the Great Wall are something else. At first, I wanted to chuckle as they sidled up to me and said repeatedly “Lookalooka thankyuvurrehmoch,” but then they barred my way, grabbed my paw, and pulled me into their booths! They were strong for little, old ladies! It must have been that incantation of theirs! I had to resort to extreme evasion tactics. Two of them ended up knocking their heads together trying to get at me! Let that be a lesson to them! Oh, and as a word of advice, if you ever shop in China, plan to spend a third of the price the vendors are asking. If you don’t speak Chinese, they’ll try to get a premium out of you!
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The reason we only got two hours on the wall is that we had to fit in an hour’s drive to—you guessed it—Tourist Trap #3: the Cloisonné Factory. Needless to say, there was much talk of mutiny among the passengers, but at least we got lunch out of it. Apparently, people really like to eat sea cucumbers here, claiming that doing so is good for your “heat” and your “thynoid.” I don’t know what a thynoid is, but I’ll take my chances. Those sea cucumbers looked too slimy!
Our last stop for the day was the Dingling Ming Tomb. I did not take a picture here, because it is very bad fortune to take pictures in a dead place, but I promise I did not make up the name! This place gave me the creeps. Shine led us through the gateway of the Netherworld, or “Netherlands,” making us either dead or Dutch. Either way, the passcode for entry was “Sorry, I am here.” So the spirits clearly didn’t want us there, and if there’s one thing that’s immune to all five of the Deadly Arts, it’s an angry spirit!
The tomb was an empty, gray vault, called the Underground Palace. The coffins had been gathered and concealed under big, red, metal boxes and showered with yuan bearing the face of Mao. No wonder those spirits were angry! One interesting fact about the people in the boxes, though, was that after 500 years without oxygen, the bodies still haven’t decayed! That gave me the billy-willies, and I flat-tailed it out of there! I hope tomorrow is bright and sunny, because I think I’ll have nightmares tonight: Shine brought us in through the Netherlands Gate, but forgot to take us out again!
Slaap lekker!
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