Why didn’t anyone tell me?? I’ve seen plenty of walls in my day. Plenty! A wall is a rectangular-shaped object made of horizontal lines. Those rules do not apply to the “great” wall.
Ok, I’ve seen pictures. It’s big windy road of gray stones in what I know realize is a mountainous region. What I didn’t quite realize is that more than horizontally windy, the Great Wall is more like the spine of a giant Chinese dragon, a seemingly endless rollercoaster of vertical curves.
We had a mini-field trip to the wall: my director, Debbie, Roxanne, Kel, Corey, the fourth grade teacher (who lived around the corner from me in Pslope and I’m still not convinced isn’t a lesbian), and her 4-year old child, Xin Xin, who she adopted from China two years ago. It was Tsinghua Primary School takes on the Great Wall (minus Erica, who has lived in Beijing before and is “so over” the great wall that “it’s a pile of rubble” to her.)
Of all the sections close to BJ (haha), we went to Badaling, the part referred to as the wall’s “Disney Land.” Now I’ve never been to Disney Land myself, but I could imagine that it wasn’t the type of crowd I wanted to be stuck with in a stone corridor up in the mountains. Our first climb was just as I’d feared, and we ended up scaling the stone-paved hill amid hoards of people, many of whom were stopping on the side to take pictures and blocking the hand rails. I had the uneasy realization that, were I to slip, I’d not only tumble down this 80 degree incline over grey stone, but I’d take crowds of innocent people with me.
Luckily for us, though, it was only ultra crowded at the beginning, and we soon broke off to the right to less and less crowded sections. It was interesting, however, to see Chinese tourists for the first time. I’m so used to being the odd person out, while everyone around me is bristling by at the pace of I-do-this-every-day. It was somewhat refreshing to see a crowd of Chinese people, pausing by the railing and hearing the count “ee-ar-san” before a camera click.
The wall was broken into many different sections, and at the end of each section was a watch tower. This helped to break up the climb, and gave way to amazing views of the other sections in the mountains. The climb, like I alluded to at the beginning, was intense. I don’t know why I figured that walking on the Great Would be like walking on stone pavement, just elevated and winding to the right or the left. When there were stairs, they came up to my knee. Many sections were just a stone slide or hill for us to slip on. Most of the time I was clutching the metal hand rail for all I was worth. (This became increasingly difficult, as the heat of the sun soaked right into these, I think, to add a bit more excitement for us all.)
Even so, by the time we finally found a stairway that would lead us down and off of the wall, I was loving every minute of it. We all went on a little farther, and Debbie and I decided to climb one last set of mountain stairs to the watch tower. When we finally reached the top, we found two Chinese men smoking cigs. Thanks, China. It’s been real.
(Ok, so this entry is super overdue. I went on 9/12, but with Kel’s bday and crazy weird school scheduling/getting ready for Curriculum Afternoon , I never wrote it. Whoops! This is why the rest of my entries read like a stream of conscious garble that I’ve never proof read. That is, because they are, and because that’s how I keep this this up to date!)
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