Embarrassingly slow

Tuesday was another fun hooky day. I got to go to the Great Wall one last time with my dad before leaving. The driver we stumbled on was great and ended up taking both my dad and I to the airport later. He spoke good English and knew a lot of cool things about the area we drove through.

He recommended a couple of touristy stops along the way to and from the wall. The first was a place that sold a lot of cloisonné style goods. They had a little spiel where you walked around and they told you about making the goods. Then of course there was a sales room at the end. I had never realized how much work went into these pieces so that aspect of it was cool. I was also able to pick up some cool gifts for a couple of people at the store.


After that we went to the MuTianYu section of the wall. This is the same section of the wall my mom and aunt went to. I like it a lot more than BaDaLing. The wall itself is not that dramatically different but the drive up there and the surrounding area is a lot cooler. Also it is a lot less touristy. We wandered around until my chest felt like it was on fire and I was worried about a heart attack. I was getting over being sick so that must have been the cause of my unease. Surprisingly it was not as steep as BaDaLing. There were also some cool places to climb around.






After walking the wall we took the slide down. That was pretty embarrassing. As we were taking the gondola up to the wall we kept hearing one of the guys working on the slide yelling at people to slow down. As I went down he was yelling at me to speed up. There was one point where I came to a complete stop. Let me set the scene, this is a slide down a mountain. I was riding the brake pretty hard to get the sled to stop.




We had a nice meal afterwards with Henry at a Sichuan place he recommended. My dad was not a big fan as the meat had bones and the other dish we ordered was nice and spicy. It was cool talking to Henry though about his life and what he had to do work wise to make ends meet. It is amazingly hard for an average Chinese person to live well.


On the way home we stopped at a silk museum which was another small exhibition on making silk and a room to buy all sorts of silk goods. It was cool to see but it was pretty touristy. Both my dad and I ended up getting comforters but that was about it. They should be nice but we will see.

After the big trip we just went to the local hot pot place and had some good hot pot for the last time (sniff). I will miss that quite a bit. The food was good and the company better. A good way to finish a nice visit.