China and The Great Wall

China- Beijing & The Great Wall
Well, we made it. After an intense 16 hour travel day we arrived in Beijing, unfortunately 1 back-pack missing. Christina’s pack got held in our transfer city in China by the airline due to a cigarette lighter. But we managed for a day and were able to retrieve the pack in 24 hrs only lesser a handful of Yuan (Chinese Money) getting back and forth.
Beijing is big, very big. Over 20,000,000 people call the Northern Capital home. An extremely developed city to say the least, enormous high-rises and complexes are everywhere. Fast trains, buses, subways, taxis, cars, cars, cars are everywhere. Oh and did I mention lots of People? Beijing has felt a bit like Disneyworld during peak season on horse-steroids. Envision: line, line, waiting, waiting, crowd, crowd, push, push, nudge, nudge, and throw in a lot of spit, spit and you’ve got it. The Chinese are more “aggressive” than we’re accustomed to and we have some quick acclimating to get used to it appears. The Mandarin language describes the word “Guanxi” as “relationships”, which are imperative to Chinese culture, and if you don’t have a relationship with someone, you basically matter little or not at all, so it’s easy to see someone cut right in front of you in line or nudge you out of the way to claim their spot, since you kind of don’t exist.
The language barrier and reading barrier has been enormous, but we’re thankful for our beginner Mandarin lessons we had in Bali and a great travel tip to have someone write in Chinese an address or our need on paper so we can just shove it out to be read. China’s different and we’re getting cracked open even more by this experience.
Oh and we’ve done a crap load of walking in Beijing, it really does feel like going to an amusement park at the end of the day, except the only ride was the wave of people you surfed in to get crammed on the subway car.
The easiest highlight was going to see The Great Wall of China. It’s about 3 hours north of Beijing and we took a tour with about 40 other travelers to spend 4 hours hiking a 10k section of the wall with some very steep sections. It is truly a spectacular, awe inspiring sight. They said you could take all the bricks, stack them 1 meter high and it would still circumnavigate the entire globe. It stretched as far as the eye could see, right on the top of mountain peaks. The engineering feat and lives lost are mind boggling, I’m sure the wall doubled as a burial place for far too many of it’s constructors.
Other medium lights (not worthy of “highlights”): Tianamen Square, Olympic Village (Bird’s Nest Stadium), Flag Lowering Ceremony, The Forbidden City, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, & The Summer Palace. All very large places with lots of walking and viewing pretty places and buildings, unfortunately along with hordes of other people.
One thing I would comment on though is that China has a definitive “Buzz” about it of economic growth and opportunity. It has a little of what I imagine the industrial revolution in America must have felt like, crossed with the wild-west. There are 1.5 billion people here, all hustling to prosper, create and carve their success in the world. They are hungry, you can just sense it.