May 10, 2011
After the long adventure to Beijing, we finally arrived to China’s capital. Not even being in the country for more than an hour we already had the local population wanting to take pictures of us. I felt like Brad Pitt walking around being followed by his paparazzi. After settling down into our hotel we ventured off for a late night snack. Leave it up to all the guys to find the “innocent looking English speaking” Chinese lady wanting to help us find food. Don’t be fooled ladies and gents; she took us to a teahouse rather than a family style restaurant. In other words we didn’t get the best bang for our bucks but luckily we met our professors on the way so we weren’t at the disadvantage of the language barrier. Otherwise we may have fallen into the trap of paying a hefty price for a small portioned meal. But the Local Chinese are extremely friendly in Beijing. And if you go to the markets get ready for some extremely outgoing one-on-one marketing strategies. Away from the main strip you can find people packed into alleyways lined with street venders. It’s honestly a true adventure. They sell anything from knock off watches to little figurines that you can actually have your face carved into. And for the daring, they have an assortment of exotic food you can buy like live scorpion. I kid you not four of us have tried it; myself included thanks to a foreigner telling me I wasn’t man enough to try it, but it wasn’t bad. It was actually pretty good. It had a lot of flavor from when they fried and was extremely crunchy. One should become a little familiar with the language before entering the markets though. As fun as they are to walk through if you don’t understand how to say no thank you, one would be completely lost. For the outgoing individual who truly wants to experience something other than a typical shop from America, they have to adventure down the packed allies and see a true Chinese market in Beijing.
My favorite place we visited in Beijing was the Great Wall. Don’t get me wrong I’m a pretty active individual but nothing could have prepared me for the workout on this Chinese national monument. The only thing I expected was that there was a wall on a mountain side that emperors in China’s past built to keep outsiders away. Little did I know it was on mountains that seemed to be steeper than a half pipe at some points. Me being me, after I got into through the gate, took off from the rest the path. I wanted to go as far as I could in the two hours I had. That really came back to haunt me the next day when every muscle in my leg was sore. Even muscles I didn’t know existed were sore. I kid you not there was a point in the great wall that literally might have been a sixty degree incline. I had to take a break after every ten steps it felt like. It just so happened to be the last part we climbed as well. Not only was it hard to climb it was scary as anything to climb down. After trucking through step after step, my legs were shaking once we had to turn around. It’s not the most reassuring thing to have your knees feel like they’re about to buckle when you’re on an extremely steep incline with another three hundred steps to go. I can’t even imagine what it was like hundreds of years ago to build and construct such a structure when they didn’t have today’s technologies. Even with today’s technologies, it would be extremely hard to reproduce such a masterpiece.
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