The Great Wall Of China

Day 23

I woke up at 6:00, stuffed up as usual and wrote the blog post about yesterday as I waited for Andrea to get up. Li Feng made a huge breakfast: eggs both hard boiled and scrambled with tomato, noodles, cucumber salad, and fruit. We ate, walked to the train station together where we met Donna, Ray, Tianzu, and an 18 year old who asked us to call him Jack. We paired off, using a busddy system for the day to avoid a repeat of yesterday's debacle.

We took two subway lines to the bus stop that we needed. The subway was crowded; the cars a tad less crowded than I've seen in Tokyo or New York but the station where we switched lines was worse.

When we arrived at the Great Wall we bought tickets for the sliding cars, little cars like those that you might find on a kiddie roller coaster that take you half way up to reduce the amount of climbing that you need to do.

We rode the car up, walked seven of the eight towers, decided that the crowd between us and the last tower was just impenetrable so we turned around and headed back.

Andrea, Ari, Donna, and I went shopping in the center of Beijing. Well, mostly we looked at the outside of stores that sold luxury goods that we'd never buy. We went into a huge bookstore and bought Ari a notebook, which he been asking for, and we got some lotus for seeds from a street vendor. They taste sorry of like coconut but with a hint of bitter.

We returned home and hung out for a while. While Li Feng made dinner, Donna, Jack, Tianzu, Joshua (who had gone trio an Internet Cafe) and Ray all trickled in. At around 7 we all set and ate a huge meal. Beef, tofu, eggs, two kinds of noodles, fried carrot balls, and vegetables. After dinner the adults sat and talked (and ate watermelon). We discussed hosting Ray and Bill next summer in the United States. We talked about sending Zachary again in the future. Nothing was resolved but it felt good to talk about it with real friends.