Beijing, The Great Wall

The Great Wall trip required that we had a guide so of course, on the way there we stopped off at the Cloisonné factory and gallery as well as the Jade factory and gallery. Apparently we didn’t take any pictures there. The greeters at the Great Wall are the black bears. She was a hungry bear too. You could buy chopped fruit to throw to the bear.

There were two options on getting up to the Great Wall, walking/climbing or taking the tram. We chose to take the tram. It only took us about half way up and some walked to the top. We walked a little further to get some good photos and decided that was far enough. The green picture of Chris is a self portrait on tram ride in a tunnel.

At the end of the pictures, we included a few pictures of our spacious hotel room. It was the Kapok Hotel in the heart of Beijing, about two blocks from the Forbidden City and maybe six blocks from Tiananmen Square. We could walk to “food street” for street food. This was about a block of street vendors who sold anything you can imagine on a stick, battered and fried, including scorpions, other bugs, star fish and many other things. We had dinner there one night. I stuck with the safe vegetarian choices. We didn’t take any pictures because it was usually evening and I guess we didn’t think to bring the camera.

Just beyond food street was shopping street. In one direction, car traffic is no longer allowed and you can walk up and down the street and shop. There were a couple of malls there and one day we had a big Mac from good old McDonald’s. That may have been the best meal I had. The food we have in the US is not real Chinese food and I knew that, but I will be glad to get back to the US to have some real Chinese food as I have always known it.