The best thing about the whole Beijing Shi area is definitely the Great Wall. I wasn't that excited about it before, knowing that I've seen it so many times already on TV and countless pictures of it. So it wasn't going to be a surprise in any way, so I thought.
We went to Wall with a group of Swedes (who had just finished their semester one in Auckland) and had a nice English-speaking guide. In the pamphlet description of the trip, it says "Visit to Great Wall at Simatai and Ming Tombs as well as shopping". Little did we know that "shopping" would actually dominate the whole trip and it's not shopping in the normal sense. We were hoarded up to two jade factories, a pottery workshop and a tea-selling teahouse on the pretext of discovering Chinese culture and art but later discover that they're all massive tourist traps that expect you to buy, buy, and buy. There are few bizzarre things that our guide wanted us to do:
1. Tell everyone we're Americans.
2. Don't tell the second jade factory that we've already been to one just an hour ago.
3. Buy him a jade ball on a stick?!! for him (he gave the money). err.. We dont know why.
The Ming Tombs were an amazing piece of religious/dynastic architecture but we were too drained to even pay attention to our guide.
By the time we got to the Ming Tomb, we're already drained. I tried to summon up the architecture geek in me but everything seem like we've been there, done that. So we could not be arsed to pay attention to what the guide was saying. Only thing I remembered about it was the way he pronounced "Ming Dynasty" strictly pinyin way. And oh yeah after that I tried to haggle for an already dirt-cheap pack of playing cards in a nearby stall and got told off.
But the Great Wall was amazing. It vindicated the cheesy-ness of all the other stuff in the trip. We were extraordinarily lucky that the weather was good. The climb was quite challenging, I felt stupid for not realising that climbing the Great Wall amounts to climbing a mountain. I was practically crawling on the Wall's staircase for an hour or so. Usman was laughing. For once in his life, he felt superior. But seriously it was really steep. It's like 45 degrees or something ridiculous like that and looking back you can see yourself dropping down few hundred metres into the deep ravines. But nothing describes the feeling of arriving to the highest point on the Wall, you feel rewarded straight away and yes the view was amazing. I even decided to inflict an astronomical phone bill on myself by calling my mom while we're on top of the mountain.
So overall, it was a good trip. We enjoyed ourselves.
-Ihsan
0 comments:
Post a Comment