My feet are aching!

At the Great Wall, Badaling area today. There is a nice sloping ramp for about 50 feet, and THEN the steps start. Big ones, little ones, uneven ones, and steep ones. Well, most of them are steep. Seems like 45 degrees on the way up, and 90 degrees on the way down. The wall starts out wide enough for 4-5 on each side, and then narrows down to one person going up and one coming down. Spectacular experience - multi-cultural huffing and puffing on up the wall. We didn't get over the top of the hill, but had enough of an experience to say we were there.

My camera batteries died yesterday at the Summer Palace, just as we were visiting with Luo Zheng, a professor at university (he said), in art. He was practicing what he called 'behavioral art' - writing in Chinese on the sidewalk with pens that were 5 feet tall. One end held a water bottle, siphoning water thru a 3/4 inch pvc pipe with foam calligraphy brush on the other end. One in each hand. Wrote, in English, forward and backward, upside down. Ambidextrious. I had him write in my journal, so I can show you what he was doing. Anyway, at the Great Wall, in one of the little shops, they had my batteries! Yeah!

This morning, our unscheduled tour (ie on your own) was to a neighborhood market - looks like a flea market set up, but selling produce, clothing, kitchen utensils and so forth. Some of the fruit and veggies I had not seen before. Must have been a hundred vendors set up by 7 am. Our other unscheduled tour was to a local supermarket about a block from the hotel. Sort of like a Freddies. The prices were pretty darn good! And they had Dove bars that I haven't seen before - chocolate, not soap, of course.

The building here in Beijing is off the chart. We had a long ride back from the Ming tombs today, getting caught in rush hour traffic. I saw over 50 cranes building skyscrapers, and that's when I started counting. I saw 20 of them from one location. This town will never be the same. The growth seems to be in a frenzied state. And yet, not everyone is experiencing the growth, but we only see a little of that being contained as we are on a tour. But, our tour guide did talk about the economic changes; downsizing of state run factories; lots of people being "off job" in over 30 years of working for same company; high taxes - well, some of it sounded familiar.

Yesterday we walked all over the Forbidden City, and Summer Palace. Stunning architecture. They are gearing up for the Olympics in 2008. All of the buildings at FC were under going renovation. The workers on the roofs replacing tile, and those repaving brick pathways were more of a photo op to me than some of the static building images. Lots of pics you'll have to sit through!

See you later.