Day 5 – Beijing – Great Wall Glory
So I’m starting this day with an incident I totally forgot to mention, that happened on Day 4. I’d actually woken up at a reasonable time, and was not only on time, I was running a bit early! Which is pretty unheard of for me, and I should have suspected something would happen. I went through my usual routine, then went to plug in my flat iron for my hair when *Whammo*!! A *huge* spark flew out between the adaptor I’d already plugged in, and the plug for the flat iron. Then everything went out. The lights, the TV, the whole room went dead. Yep. At the very least, I’d blown a fuse. My hair (obviously) was not done, I didn’t have any makeup on yet. Yes, first world problems for a high-maintenance person! Plus, that spark had kind of freaked me out! So first I called Ralph to let him know what was going on, in case I was late (thank goodness I was running early!) Then I called the front desk and let them know what had happened, and they said someone would be right up.
I went back into the bathroom, and the adapter and the wall plug were pretty charred. Maintenance came up pretty quickly to check everything out, and flip the breaker back on (which happened to be in a locked cabinet in the dressing room/closet.) Then, the management type who came up with them tried to explain to me that my flat iron needed to be dual voltage to work in China, because they had 220 voltage there. I tried to explain to him that I knew that. That the flat iron *was* dual voltage, and that I’d used it in for at least 2 previous European vacations and had just used it in Hong Kong for 3 days. It took him a long time to believe me (I finally got out a magnifying glass and showed him the tiny lettering on the inside that showed that it worked in both 110 and 220v.) He pulled out a new adapter from one of the night stands, and then tried the flat iron in another plug in the main room. It worked just fine. Hair crisis averted! But I’ll tell you, once I started thinking about it, it was pretty scary! I don’t know if the wall plug was bad, or the adapter was bad, or if maybe I’d tried to plug the flat iron in upside-down or what. All I knew was, it didn’t work! Anyways, I managed to get myself together, grab some breakfast, and make it out for our trip to the Temple of Heaven with another story to add to my tales!
Anyways, onwards to Day 5! Today was one of the days I was really looking forward to: The Great Wall of China!!
ABD goes to a section of the Great Wall called Mutianyu. It’s a bit more remote & farther from Beijing, but that means it’s less crowded. And we seemed to still be in our freakishly un-busy tourist time in Beijing. (NOT that any of us were complaining!) So it really was remarkably uncrowded. That really added to the enjoyment!
We were set free for a short period of time to shop the many vendors that lined the walkway leading up to the Wall. We were to meet at the end of the walkway at the appointed time. There were a lot of different vendors, selling a lot of touristy stuff. I saw CaliforniaGirl09 and her DD at a stand where a man was carving your name in both English and Chinese onto the bottom of a soft stone stamp. They were pretty cool, and had your Chinese Zodiac animal carved on the top. They’d bartered a pretty good price, so I decided to join in on the transaction, and get one for myself. But then the guy started to talk about us picking it up later in the day as it would take him a couple of hours to do. We’d been told we weren’t returning this way, so told him we couldn’t do that, and started to walk away. Suddenly, it would only take him 5 minutes. They really did turn out very cool!
After we all met up, we headed up the hill to the gondolas. It was a *really* steep walkway! You can get a sense of the angle from this picture. (I actually took this picture because I thought this
scooter cover was pretty darn cute. They were actually fairly common!)
This was our first view of the Great Wall as we headed from the walkway up to the gondolas.
After more of a workout than I’d expected, we got to the gondolas. I guess getting up there could have been a LOT worse without the gondolas!!
The excitement was growing as we got peeks of the wall on our way up!
We arrived at a small plaza, with a commemoration stone, and a chance to steel yourself before the last steep stairway up to the Wall. Ralph gave a short speech, told us where to stop once we got up there (for pics, of course!) and then set us loose!
Continued in next post