Dispatch: The Great Wall

No Olympics for us today. Instead, we hired a car and driver to take us to the Great Wall, the airport’s new Terminal 3, the Beijing Hutongs, and finally Tiananmen Square.  Our first destination was the Mutianui section of the Great Wall which is about an hour outside of Beijing. We were allotted an hour and a half to sightsee so we blasted through the trinket village with blinders on. A breathtaking cable car ride later and we were there. Justine and I waved to God because the Great Wall can supposedly be seen from outer space and I believe that’s where heaven is. Kelby proceeded to document every brick with his camera. Based upon our last experience on the Great Wall, which left us crab walking for a week, we slowed down our pace, got in lots of pictures and were only 15-minutes late getting back down the hill. “Welcome to the mutinay Great wall next time” greeted us on a banner as we exited the trinket village.

Our next destination took us from one of the ancient wonders of the world to the newest wonder of the world. Terminal 3 is the largest airport terminal in the world. Spanning 254 acres the terminal was specifically built to handle Olympic traffic. Altogether the three buildings of terminal 3 house 445 lifts, 1,800 miles of cables and a car park for 7,000 vehicles. The roof of the main terminal building mirrors the color scheme of the Forbidden City and covers over 80 acres and measure 800m across at the widest point. We didn’t go in any farther than the entrance, but guess what? We did take a bunch of pictures of the breathtaking new facility.

The driver negotiated a free lunch as a condition to taking us to Terminal 3 since it wasn’t on our original itinerary so he took us to a dumpling house where the seven of us scarfed down 9-different varieties of dumplings before heading out to Beijing’s Hutongs, which are the traditional narrow alleys, many of which have been destroyed to make way for the future and for the Olympics. Our intimate tour included a visit to a traditional Hutong residence. Typically built as a series of small buildings arranged in a quadrangle around a courtyard and hidden behind a red door pregnant with status symbolism, the home we visited has been occupied by the same family for more than 180 years. I didn’t ask, but I suspect that the mortgage has been paid off by now. We toured the rest of the Hutong in a rickshaw before being deposited back at our van.

Tiananmen Square, which sits just north of the Forbidden City covers 100 acres, making it the world’s largest open-urban plaza. While Kelby took pictures of every paver, the rest of us wandered around doing our best to avoid stepping into other people’s snapshots, Oh, and there are many other people all over urban China. If one is going to enjoy China one must accept huge crowds everywhere and be prepared to defer to vehicles, pedestrians, and any other moving object that gets between you and your destination. Afterwards, we ate a quick dinner at a Japanese fast food joint near Tiananmen Square and taxied back to our apartment to catch up on Olympic developments. Damn, the Chinese have 45 gold medals. Based upon TV coverage many of them were earned playing ping pong and badminton.