About one month ago, Mandi and I visited the Great Wall of China about 75 miles north of Beijing and spent an entire afternoon hiking a nine kilometer length. While I had visited the wall once before, this was Mandi's first time to actually walk on the wall, and we chose what has to be one of if not the most spectacular part of the entire 4,000 miles. 

The Great Wall has various sections that are open to tourists and hiking, the most commonly visited being the Badaling and Mutianyu sections near Beijing. Previously, Adam and I had gone to the Mutianyu section, which was really amazing and totally upended my conception of the wall. Mutianyu is in very good or even restored condition for most of its length, however, and overall only had one really steep climb. Since I wanted to see something new and Mandi is apparently part mountain goat, we decided to head to the Jinshanling and Simatai sections of the wall, which are farther away, mostly unrestored (that is, collapsing) and extremely treacherous.

The trip began with a bus ride to a mountain near the center of the Jinshanling area. From there we made the relatively short ascent to the wall and then turned east to hike to Simatai. As you'll see in some of the pictures, the surface of the wall was often in a state of utter disrepair, and the battlements were missing for a lot of its length. After lots of pictures, two bottles of water apiece, a whole host of Europeans and countless thousands of steps, we crossed the river gorge that marked the end of the line. On the bus ride home we watched the entirety of Casablanca on my PSP :) Anyway, a great day and a bunch of pictures to share. If you're ever in China, don't shortchange yourself - for all the hype, the Great Wall really is well worth your time.

The view as we began our walk up to the wall.

Us! And a KAFI shirt makes it to the Great Wall.

Mandi in front of the serrated landscape.

Looking west along the length of the wall.

Looking east - it was uphill nearly all the way to the end of the hike.

Approaching a steep climb, and note the lack of battlements.

Perhaps the steepest part on the day, along with pretty degraded steps.

Behind us after conquering the summit.

Some of the bricks are missing.

The river gorge and end of our hike is behind me - note the wall climbing back up at Simatai.

Very authentic :)

Seeing the wall run straight along the highest ridge of the mountains, I decided that it tends to follow the path of most resistance.

Iowa + Peru = Terraced corn fields of China

The river snaking below us as we dragged ourselves towards the end.

After descending. Zoom this picture and check out the wall running along the top of that ridge.

Not much to say, just thought I should take the opportunity offered by the good weather to share a corresponding night shot from our window, facing south over Beijing. The daytime shot is in the Sept. 12th post. Sorry, my photography skills are lacking! Wish Adam or somebody were here to do it justice.

Some pictures from the Temple of Heaven, which Mandi and I visited a few weeks ago. The temple is located in south central Beijing, and is filled with people doing all sorts of fun things - playing games, dancing, Tai Ji, etc. Historically, it is the place that the emperors would visit to pray for good harvests.

Water calligraphy on the grounds, very cool to watch.

Looking south towards the main gate. A smoggy day but not even close to the worst.

The beautiful ceilings. Per my post below, I'm very glad they chose to repaint these as they were intended to be viewed.

Mandi in front of the temple.

Some Tai Ji practitioners towards the north end of the temple grounds. It was a lovely morning even through the pollution.

Authenticity is an issue that I run into frequently here in China. For one thing, China is certainly known the world over for its fakes - fake DVDs, fake name-brand clothes and so on. Even the recent tainted milk issues were based on the idea of producing "fake" milk - that is, using filler to trick quality control and get the poisoned milk onto shelves. But authenticity operates in a lot of ways in a place changing as fast and with as long a history as China.

For instance, many of you are familiar with the hutongs or traditional style of housing in Beijing - four or more families arranged around a courtyard, each courtyard opening through an arch onto the alleyway or street. These dwellings have been rapidly demolished, especially in the run up to the Olympic Games this year. Two years ago I travelled through a Beijing in which entire blocks were marked with "chai," the Chinese character for "demolish." This year I haven't seen a single "chai," but I have seen plenty of widened avenues and newly built commercial complexes named after the hutongs that previously stood in their place. Is the Beijing I see today less authentic than that which existed two or twenty years ago?

Another example is that of the traditional tourist sights and their restorations. The Forbidden City has been totally repainted in the last couple years to look like it was built yesterday. Large sections of the Great Wall have been totally rebuilt since their destruction, which sometimes was as recent as the Cultural Revolution. Tourists can walk along a Great Wall that is only twenty years old. Are these things diminished by their newness?

In most cases I don't think they are. The Temple of Heaven has been rebuilt something like thirty times over the past six centuries - wooden construction lends itself to frequent fire / rebuilding cycles. Each time, that place remained the place where Emperors offered sacrifices for the harvest. Today the thirty-oddth Temple stands as a center of Beijing tourism, Beijing history and Beijing's civic life as a park space used daily by thousands of residents and visitors. Similarly with the Great Wall and Forbidden City - the particular wood or bricks aren't as important as the form and location.

The hutong situation is definitely more difficult, partly because other cities have done a much better job of preserving their ancient core while still modernizing. Xi'an and Luoyang are two cities in China that managed to entirely preserve or at least reconstruct the old city walls and gates, with the areas insides reflecting the traditional architecture, dwellings etc. while the high rises go up outside. Given their success, Beijing has certainly failed - but I have trouble declaring this inauthentic. Beijing is the capital and a symbol of where China is and is going, and while I mourn the fact that so much history has been wiped out, the Beijing that exists right now is as authentically turn of the century urban China as anyplace else.

Anyway, these are just a few of the thoughts bouncing around my mind as I visit the sights and live day to day in a place with 3,500 years of recorded history.

Sorry for the extremely long time without updates. Things have been going along at a good pace here

- class is still very productive, the food is still good and the pollution still fluctuates between

pea soup and clear. I know it's been a long interval, so I'm putting up a few posts that I've had brewing for awhile. First is a pretty standard news post, followed by one on the idea of authenticity in China and later this week another on my visit with Mandi to the Great Wall.

Most recently, I took a two day trip with about sixty IUP students and teachers to Luoyang, an ancient capital of China and today a city of about six million residents located in China's central-eastern region. We took an overnight train for about eleven hours from a third huge train station in Beijing which I didn't know existed until now. We woke up and got off in Luoyang at about 7am - pretty convenient and quite comfortable. From there, we headed first to the White Horse Temple, site of the first Buddhist temple ever established in China. Next was the nominally more exciting Shaolin Temple, world-famous for its Gongfu-practicing (Kung Fu) monks. A neat place but very crowded - we did get to see a bit of a martial arts exhibition but overall the pagoda forest was a more interesting site, with the oldest pagodas dating back to the Yuan and even Tang dynasties (~1000-1400 years old). Some great Korean barbecue rounded out the night, which involves sitting around a table in the middle of which is a pit of hot coals with a grill. You order raw meat and then cook it yourself, which is fun and also extremely delicious. Two plates of lamb, two plates of beef, one of pork and a catfish (they cooked that one) later, I fell into bed at our hotel. 

The next day, we spent the morning at the real treasure of Luoyang - the Longmen Grottoes. Thousands of figures of the Buddha are carved into the rock walls on either side of the river, mostly recessed into caves or niches. Again, these date back about 1,500 years at the oldest and included some really impressive statues along with lots of intricate, smaller carvings. The honeycombed appearence of the rock from across the river was striking. China today has only a small Buddhist population and much of the work has been despoiled by either early twentieth-century Western collectors or rampaging Cultural Revolutionaries, but it's still very much worth visiting.

We came back for a banquet lunch and then spent the rest of the afternoon in a park outside the old city wall of Luoyang. Another IUP student, gifted in music, had brought her violin along and played for us as curious Chinese folks gathered around this outlandish group of foreigners holding their impromptu concert. 

Chinese kid: Are you from China or are you foreigners?

IUP student: What do you think?

Chinese kid: Foreigners.

IUP student: Good! What country do you think we are from?

Chinese kid: Korea?

To be fair he was only about seven :) Anyway, it was a great trip overall and a real relief to flee Beijing just as the pollution started becomign really unbearable, even if Luoyang's sky isn't exactly blue.

More posting soon, I promise.

A very cool experience to relate:

Last week, I got to go with a group of other IUP students to see the finals of the Paralympic Wheelchair Rugby competition on the next to last day of the games. If you've never run into the sport before, you can take a look over on Youtube. Anyway, we got to see both the bronze medal match between Great Britain and Canada and the gold medal match between the United States and Australia. This was held over at the sports arena of the Beijing Science and Technology University - a small but very nice venue with the full security and decorative trappings of an Olympic event. 

This sport is fairly unique, and those of you into rules (hi, Benn) would have really liked it as it still seems a bit formative. Essentially, it's a game played on a basketball court, four to a side with a goal line that must be crossed in possession of the ball for one point. It's also as full contact as wheelchairs can be, with the wheelchairs looking more like personal battle platforms than assistive moving devices. Players are free to check each other off the ball, tangle their wheels together etc. as well as make passes, handoffs, nice spin moves off the pick etc. This contact gave it the nickname "murderball." 

The first match was pretty boring to watch honestly, but the gold medal game was excellent with lots of defense and stronger team play. Australia had by far the best player on the court but he wasn't enough to overcome the balanced U.S. squad. The only issue with this great sport that I could see was the fact that cherry picking of long passes runs rampant - there's no offsides rule and there's no goalkeeper. 

Anyway, it was cool to be there with lots of Americans - they did the typical overboard fans routine and painted chests, started plenty of English and Chinese chants to the consternation of the confused Chinese volunteers tasked with shushing the crowd, and overall had a good time watching the U.S. win. Australia has a fun little chant they do (Aussia, Oi!) but they needed to get into it a little more ;)

It goes without saying that watching people play this game, some without hands, is pretty inspiring. Watching them receive the gold medal after the game was easily one of the best sporting moments I've been a part of. 

P.S. My camera died after taking eight pictures, but I'll post what little I got later today.

P.P.S. A couple shots that sort of came out. If editing weren't such a huge pain I'd add some more.

 

Nicely done exterior - full regalia.

The teams warming up before the bronze medal game. Although the press seats across the arena are empty, the stands were totally filled on our side and in the end zones by the time of the match.

Having just completed my first week in school, I can tell you that the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Study is well worth it.

Each day I start at 8am with two hours of class - 3 students and 1 instructor, no textbooks allowed. Essentially this means making sure that you understand the previous day's text or dialogue really well and then talking about it for hours. At 11am I have my "dan ban ke" - one on one class for an entire hour. I wrap up after lunch with another three student hour. So far it has been an intense though not unreasonable experience, and I can already feel the improvement. The teachers, of whom there are nearly 40 for about 50 students, are virtually all recent Chinese graduate students though some are older. They've been very patient with me which I appreciate. Michigan gave us good preparation, but it's a new experience to be expected to say complex sentences correctly instead of using "baby Chinese." 

Yesterday we were talking about the one child policy still in effect here in China with our teacher. When you make a grammatical or pronunciation mistake, the teachers generally repeat the sentence back to you correctly and then wait for you to say it again correctly yourself.

Teacher: "Does Taiwan have a similar policy?"

Student: "Taiwan and China have really different policies."

Teacher in correcting voice: "Taiwan and the Chinese mainland have really different policies." 

She was laughing as she said this (and we along with her), so don't take it too harshly :) But one always has to be aware of those political sensitivities.

If there is one thing I have come to appreciate this week it is the food in this part of Beijing. Within five minutes of my house we have a row of eight consecutive different Chinese restaurants, all offering cuisine based on a different province or style. Not to mention the innumerable small noodle places, multiple Indian restaurants, and everything else ranging from American (tried one place so far, B+ on authenticity), Korean barbeque and a Greek pita stand to Japanese-managed Italian and the usual blend of Chinese and American fast food. This is great except for the fact that, where I once expected I would live a modest lifestyle and lose some weight, I've now realized that I can eat a fabulous dinner each night for just a couple dollars. Or two dinners. Only done that once, I swear. Oh, and the Qinghua cafeterias are fine considering that they cost about 50 cents for lunch and have probably 50 different Chinese dishes to choose from.

And now, on to some pictures.

Mandi and I visited the Forbidden City, which is always worth the two hour walk through. Packed with people until you get a ways in and then it opens up and the crowds thin out.

Something I hadn't seen last time I was at the Forbidden City. This is the beginning of the "Water Palace," which was being built by the Qing Dynasty (last dynasty to rule China) in 1910-1911 before the nationalist revolution. Obviously once the revolution overthrew the emperor, construction on the palace was abandoned. It has a deep moat around it and the lower level is filled with water. I found the very European style set amidst classic Chinese architecture to be jarring. And it's really small!

Looking south on my road. The tall apartment building is where I live, way up on the 16th floor. traffic is never very heavy which is great.

The view south across Beijing from the rear sunporch where we dry our clothes. This was a very clear day, usually you can't see much beyond the tall buildings at center left. Unfortunately we don't have any windows to the west or we could see the mountains on days like this. Weather is still good with the Paralympics in town, but everyone expects that to end in a hurry come October.

The traditional Chinese street market where I shop. That's a Chinese Coca-Cola logo right at the front, next to the Cadbury's. Along with the things on the shelves, this supermarket also hand-makes really good dumplings (jiaozi) for you on the spot at the steep price of $2.50 per 50. 

There are real street stands and such with produce that one can shop at, mostly tucked away in the remaining corners of old Beijing neighborhoods. In fact, we have one such area right outside of our apartment building - a small remaining alleyway T-intersection of low brick buildings from probably the mid twentieth century, crammed in between two apartment complexes and a supermarket under the (appropriately ominous?) shadow of a Microsoft logo on the nearest glass skyscraper. Dan and I have gotten ourselves on reasonably good terms with a hole-in-the-wall restaurant's owners in there, who are more than happy to suggest items from their menu and cook them up for you within three minutes of sitting down. Impossible for me to avoid the food subject I guess. Anyway, I'll post some of those pictures next time.

And since it is Notre Dame weekend, Go Blue!