Yes, I guess you have been waiting for those since you learnt that we were in Beijing and of course, we did not miss out on them! After all our organizational time, we went to visit them all during our touristy time: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the Summer Palace! Many people had warned us that the Great Wall would be a terrible tourist trap and that we would be squeezed in between hundreds of tourist buses and millions of tourists on the Wall, so we took the trouble to drive for about 120 km
(4 hours in a small minibus with many chain smoking Chinese men, a van breakdown and replacement somewhere in nowhere 
)to get to the section of the Wall that was the furthest away from Beijing.... well, as you can see from the pics, the effort was well worth it!!! The Wall was all ours and we spent the most amazing day walking along it for about 10 km! I don't know what I had expected but it was simply amazing. The wall is so much bigger than anything I could have imagined and it is just incredible how it creeps along the hilltops as far as the eye can follow. Of course, this also meant quite a bit of sport for us in order to follow it up and down and up
and down and up and down, but it was a great experience. The landscape around was also perfect, I would have expected to see many more signs of civilization but there were just green hills. You could almost see the hordes of Genghis Khan riding on on horseback (even though the Wall was built much later and never did serve as a serious defense measure)! It was also fascinating to see both, the old and the new parts of the wall. The Chinese are basically reconstructing the whole thing to make it accessible for millions
of tourists and their work is quite as impressive as the original wall, even though it has nothing to do with our Western concept of conservation. When walking, those new parts are really nice and when you get to old and broken parts you do understand that the Chinese simply have to do something about them. Some areas were truly dangerous and we almost had to use our hands to get on safely.
After the Great Wall, our next destination was the Forbidden City (if you've seen the movie "The last emperor" you'll already know something about it), but we didn't go there alone this time. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture to proof it (Martin, if you read this, maybe you could send us one?!?!) because we took all the group pictures with his better camera, but we actually managed to meet Martin in Beijing for two days! We first traveled together through Canada, and now, after
his year in Singapore, our travel paths crossed again and we spent two short but awesome days together! It felt so good to see someone from home again!! Anyhow, our first destination was the Forbidden City, where the Chinese emperors used to live secluded from his population until the last one was thrown out by Mao. It was, well, red and yellow! Basically, every building inside the walls shows those colors and after a while you get a little dizzy, particularly when the heat burns pitilessly down on you and the city does not offer much shadow. I think you can almost see the heat on the pictures (at least that's what I imagine...). Some of the
buildings are used as museums, exhibiting treasures of the emperors and objects of everyday use in their lives, a very interesting one is dedicated to the life of the "last emperor", and - we had almost given up hope to see any living green within the compound - there is a small garden to walk through and relax. I found the City an interesting place to visit but nothing that impressed me particularly. It showed Chinese perfection but seemed very lifeless and uninviting.
The last major tourist trap to visit before our departure the next day was the famous Summer Palace, where the Chinese emperors used to spend some time when the Forbidden City heated up too much during the extreme summer months. The Palace is actually much more than just one building or one complex of buildings, it is a huge park situated on the borders of a lake and it includes many different
temples, palaces, walk-ways, boats, hanging water gardens, and even some grassy areas (even though there was still a little bit too much concrete for my taste...). You can spend a whole day in it and we walked much more than David's legs usually like to support. The red walls and yellow roofs reminded us just slightly of the Forbidden City, but some of the unofficial quarters with their gray roofs looked
like the waves of a upturned, stormy ocean. When strolling along the lake, we had ample opportunity to marvel at typically Chinese dragon boats - although David was even more fascinated by a boat completely out of marble that is not able to swim but still very beautiful (pic in his post). In the end we preferred to walk around the lake instead of taking a boat but they did render the atmosphere
even more "Chinese". :) For my part, I liked the "green" parts of the Summer Palace best. Around the lake, there were too many tourists and we have really seen lots of red-yellow palaces by now, but the Chinese gardens, especially the one with the water-pavilions was just beautiful, relaxing, and far away from all the troubles, noise, and the constriction of the city. I could have spent hours there sitting in the shadows, watching the few people and the birds, or reading a good book.
So, in the end, we managed to see quite a bit of Beijing (including the new and old districts and an acrobatic show in the evening) even though we spent less time in the city than planned, and we also spent much more time on stupid administrative run-around-jobs than planned, and we also spent much more time stuck in public transport or getting lost in public transport or getting lost in the streets than planned....
However, we are far from having visited all the different things an ancient capital like Beijing offers to the interested mind and we'll definitely have to come back again to discover some more - some more of this city and some more of the fascinating country that has surprised us more than anything else during our travels so far. The great eye-opener, I guess that describes best what China has been to us. I wasn't even too interested to come here in the first place but I have to admit that China has some great culture to offer, an astonishingly diverse and beautiful country, and very friendly, modern, and nice people. We are heading into Mongolia now, but we'll be back here for sure one day!
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