Beijing on Monday night

It's a rainy Monday night in Beijing, which reportedly isn't unusual for this time of the year -- it's the beginning of the rainy season. The good news is that the rain didn't start until later in the day, and it didn't really interfere with our activities.

That was very good news because today we visited the GREAT WALL. What an experience. We spent about 2 hours hiking up and down the wall, and I do mean HIKE, because in many places the top of the wall is very, very steep. The wall, and the view of the wall winding along the top of the mountains, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We took approximately 3.25 billion photos during the two-hour visit, which means that we could probably completely reconstruct it in its entirety from the digital photographs. ;-)

The only downside to the wall is the prevalence of extremely, uh, 'motivated' souvenir vendors, who are actually on the wall itself. Sometimes it was like running the gauntlet, although, uh, we did buy some stuff from them (such as "I hiked the Great Wall" t-shirts and other cultural artifacts).

On the way back we stopped at the Ming Tombs, where an ex-emperor of the Ming Dynasty is buried. To be frank, it wasn't all that exciting, and I also believe the entire population of China was there. That's also when it started raining!

Yesterday we visited Behai Park, which was HUGE and absolutely beautiful (and it was a nice sunny day). That park is yet another place where the emperors used to hang out. It was good to be the emperor! After visiting the park, we walked through the hutongs (alleys), and stopped at a local family's house in the hutong to have a dinner of dumplings and many other wonderful Chinese foods. It was delicious ... and what a neat experience. The family was very nice. They had 3 cats, a dog, and three bi-lingual magpies. The magpies could say things in both Chinese and English, which made them much smarter than us! ;-)

After dinner we went to Houhai Bar Street, where we had drinks on a beautiful evening at an outdoor cafe right on Houhai Lake. Absolutely sublime ...

Tomorrow we will visit the Emperors' Summer Palace, and then do some shopping on Silk Street. AND ... one of the Chinese professors who visited us at Duquesne last year is going to take us out for ... KARAOKE! China will never be the same!

By the way, we've had a few sore throats and sniffles, but otherwise everyone is doing fine and having a great time!

More to come later!