Very soon after our party day, at 4:00AM the next day actually, we departed by bullet train for Beijing, China! Actually, getting from Korea to Beijing is actually only a 2 hour flight. The long and difficult part for us is getting to the Incheon airport. Located an hour west of Seoul, it is a good 5 hour train ride to get there, and there are very few trains leaving everyday from our tiny little city. While waiting in the airport, I enjoyed a Jamba juice and Jon enjoyed the draft. But we finally made it to our plane, and sat there for about 45 minutes before taking off, disappointing.
NFL Draft time!
Love me some Jamba Juice
Little worms make beautiful things
Tasty chili tofu
Jon's enjoying some nice branches from lotus plants :)
Anyway, we finally got to Beijing and met up with our own personal tour guide and our own driver and car for the four days we would be there. Pretty cool. Due to our early morning and late flight, we didn't have time to do much that day, but we went to a silk shop where they showed us the process from tiny worm to giant silk bed covers. And then they tried to sell us that bed cover. That was not about to happen, but we did purchase a nice silk wall hanging of the Great Wall. Turns out, in addition to the preplanned stops our tour included, our guide also arranged to take us to five different shops throughout the trip. These shops offered some of the unique products China has to offer, like silk. You would be given a brief 5-10 minute explanation of the product and how its made, and then you are invited to browse their shop and make a purchase, and we're assuming that in turn our guide gets a commission for bringing us. Most of the time we didn't mind.
Beautiful silk sheets
So after the silk shop it was time for dinner, and our guide and searched high and low and found the only vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. We discovered that China is like Korea in many ways, only more so. For example, Korea has temples and palaces, China's are very similar but BIGGER. Korea eats a lot of meat, China eats MORE. Koreans don't speak a whole lot of English, but Chinese people speak much less, etc. So anyway, we were happy to find this restaurant. For a people who don't have a lot of vegetarians in their culture, this restaurant was amazing! It was 100% vegetarian, but it tasted so real, almost too real sometimes haha. We had fake beef with spinach, some kind of chili 'chicken' tofu, seaweed soup, and my favorite, lotus branch dipped in a honey glaze. Yum.
The next day was a big one! It was time to see the Great Wall! But first, a stop at a jade shop :) They showed us how you start with this solid piece of rock and then slowly chisel it away and polish it into these beautiful masterpieces. One of our favorites was a gigantic jade boat that was bigger than Jon. We figure someday when we're old and rich, we'll have a room in our house just for that boat :)
Finally, on to the wall! It was about a 2 hour drive outside of Beijing, but we finally made it and our guide said, "go ahead and start climbing, see you at the bottom in an hour and a half!" So up we went. It was quite the climb, and I think our legs were sore for about 4 days afterwards, but we made it to the 'top'. I say 'top', but really it obviously just kept going and going. We just made it to the highest point of our particular stretch of the wall and called it good; it was higher than most people managed to climb. There were little shops along the way selling souvenirs and ice cream, but we weren't distracted and just kept climbing. The portion that we climbed was one of the steepest sections of the wall in the nearby vicinity, which didn't make a lot of sense to me at first. Why would you make the steepest section the most touristy? But it did provide awesome views once you got to the top of the rest of the wall. You could really get a feel for China's landscape. It was super mountainous, unlike any mountains I've ever seen (despite the terrible pollution). They surrounded us and were extremely jagged and rough. Originally the wall was 10,000 km, but now it has been reduced to about 6,000 km. For more information about the wall, click here. Going up it wasn't too crowded, but on our way down a massive school group had arrived and was on their way up, so it was slow going. Sorry for the inondation of wall photos, but come on, it's the great wall of China! Of course there's going to be a lot of pictures :) And 2 videos. So bear with me, and if you're in a hurry just scroll past them. There's more story below.
After the wall, we headed for some lunch and a stop at a nearby cloissonne shop, or enamel. It was pretty amazing to see how they take a big chunk of copper, attach a bunch of tiny wires to it to make a design, put some paint on it, burn it, and then polish to make beautiful vases and bowls.
Crazy empress's crown
After lunch we headed to the Ming Tombs. We weren't really that impressed with them, I mean, you couldn't even see the tombs. The coolest things were the unusual crowns and the bizarre tree outside. We did learn some interesting things though. For instance, the emperors were so paranoid and crazy that in order to protect the secrecy and privacy of their tombs, they would often execute the head architects after they were finished building the emperor's tomb.
Our last sight seeing stop of the day was the Summer Palace. It is so hot in China, that the emperor finally constructed a palace intended specifically for hot summer days. He built a lake on one side, and it was sheltered by a cool mountain breeze on the other. The coolest thing about the Summer Palace was the corridor. Named the Longest Corridor in the World, it is an open air outdoor corridor measuring 728 metres in length and has over 8,000 different pictures decorating it. We walked from one end to the other and back, just admiring all the artwork. Also at the Summer Palace was a giant marble boat. No, it wasn't actually sailable, it was just built by the emperor to show his wealth and power and the longevity of his reign. Recently, it has been used as a location for wedding photos and couples, as a symbol of the longevity of their love.
So after the silk shop it was time for dinner, and our guide and searched high and low and found the only vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. We discovered that China is like Korea in many ways, only more so. For example, Korea has temples and palaces, China's are very similar but BIGGER. Korea eats a lot of meat, China eats MORE. Koreans don't speak a whole lot of English, but Chinese people speak much less, etc. So anyway, we were happy to find this restaurant. For a people who don't have a lot of vegetarians in their culture, this restaurant was amazing! It was 100% vegetarian, but it tasted so real, almost too real sometimes haha. We had fake beef with spinach, some kind of chili 'chicken' tofu, seaweed soup, and my favorite, lotus branch dipped in a honey glaze. Yum. 
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