Badaling Badaboom

 

So the last leg of our Beijing trip was the wondrous Great Wall. Seeing the Wall is like this. When someone goes to the Great Wall, he wants to see a part that has rarely if ever been seen by others so that his experience can be unique or more historical (much of the wall is renovated), so we also wanted a similar adventure. But it was not to be had, instead we went to the supposedly toe-to-toe, jam-packed "beginner" part of the wall, Badaling.
But our experience wasn't at all that bad. In fact, it had one of the best idea for seeing the wall ever. A roller coaster takes you up, you see the wall, do your thing, maybe eat lunch, and then you take the roller coaster back down, with out all the hard work. You might call that cheating but after three days of nearly non-stop walking, it was doing our legs a service. And at the beginning of the park there were bear who kind of sadly enjoyed life sitting back and being fed hundreds of apples a day without doing so much as turning the head a bit, although some of the more ambitious ones would stand or climb up higher to get even more free apples.


But those are only the mere frosting of the cake that is the Great Wall. I never thought that I would ever seen  it less than a year ago, but there it was. You can't see its start or its end from here, just a long stone divide, primitive in its purpose, extraordinary in its size and its cost. I was also reminded of a line from the Chinese anthem, "Let our flesh and blood form a new great wall." Now I'm fairly certain that line means more than what I am about to say, but at Badaling the always crowded section of the wall where you don't get the "real" wall experience, I saw two Great Walls. One I walked all over, and the other I went shoulder to shoulder with, and nudged into, and shuffled past, and smiled at. 



Don't forget to check out the rest of the Great Wall picks here.