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Aaron’s Note: These posts were written during our China tour with a group from the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce in November of 2009.
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Thursday, November 12, 2009

The first night ended quickly as we passed out on the bed. We awoke at 3 in the morning, ready for the day to begin.  Turns out that’s 2pm back home, and we couldn’t quite convince our bodies that it was still time to sleep.  We persevered and fell back asleep sometime before the 6:30am wake up call.

We got ready and headed down to breakfast. Most of our hotels offer a western style breakfast, so we can get cereal, toast, bread, sausage and the like.  The typical Chinese breakfast consists of noodles, bean milk, and pickles.  It’s just a bit too early in the day for crazy food for me (Aaron), and it’s always too early in the day for Denise!

The temps were in the low 30s, and it was snowing pretty hard when we headed out

We were both pretty bummed out; because this was the day we were going to go to the Great Wall.  However, we convinced ourselves that it was going to be great anyway.  Snow on the Wall would be cool.

Our first stop of the day was the Jade Factory.  Jade is very important in China. It’s often called the Jade Kingdom.  The factory turned out to be a large store, but we learned a number of cool things.  Jade isn’t just green. It can be white, yellow, black, brown, or a number of other colors. It has a common grade and a high grade.  It can be soft, which is used for carving statues, some of which are amazingly intricate.  And it can be hard, which is used for bracelets and other jewelry.  Jade is about 80% as hard as diamonds, and is very strong.  It’s also a precious commodity, and anyone that was thinking we were going to get a deal quickly found out otherwise.  A button sized piece of jade cost as much as $100.  We saw a lot of great stuff, but passed on buying any jade (sorry Aaron’s Mom!).

Next we went to the site of the Ming Tombs.  It’s sort of like going to the Pyramids in Egypt, except here all of the tombs were built underground, without a lot of large structures on the surface.

There was a great museum there where we were able to see artifacts that came out of one of the tombs

We then walked around the grounds and took some pictures.  It was a peaceful place, especially with the snow falling softly.

The entire complex is over 30 square miles, so we certainly didn’t see everything, and we didn’t have a lot of time to explore. It was off to lunch next.

Lunch was tasty. Denise enjoyed rice, French Fries, peanuts, sesame cookies, and tangerines.  For me, it was more of the same.  At this point, I’m not complaining. It has all been delicious.  Well, not all. Each lunch comes with ten or more dishes. Half of them are great, and half of them I’m happy to not ever try again.  But it is a good variety and the quality has been excellent.

As it turns out, the restaurant is between the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall. It’s a busy spot and the restaurant can accommodate 2500 people at a time.  On the first floor, is a Cloisonne factory (you may want to Google Cloisonne).  It’s a way of creating vases and other art from copper plates. It’s beautiful and intricate work. We took a brief tour and watched workers making vases before lunch, and after lunch we went shopping in the very large store

There was almost too much to choose from, but a bunch of lucky friends and family members have some cool Christmas presents coming now.

I’m sure most of you have gone shopping at Best Buy before. Perhaps, like me, you find their sales people pushy and bothersome. Take that feeling, and multiply it by twenty-two and you may have an idea of what’s it is like in the stores here.  As we left lunch and went downstairs to go shopping, a dozen or more sales staff congregated at the bottom of the stairs like so many jackals.  A personal salesperson was discreetly assigned to each person or couple as they came into the store.  No matter what we tried, we were unable to shake our shadow.  To be fair, she was very helpful and not too pushy.  Even after we had made our purchase, she followed us around until we had left the store, explaining the different goods that we saw.

Finally, it was time for the highlight of the entire trip. We were off to see the Great Wall, the big draw that made the trip a must do for Denise and I. The bad news; it was very overcast.  The good news; the snow was no longer falling and we were in China!  So we couldn’t get the large, blue sky panoramic picture that we wanted.  We were determined to make the best of it

In Beijing, they’ve done a lot of work to repair the wall.  The first part of the wall was laid down sometime in the BCs.  The large complex north of Beijing was fully utilized during the 14th century.  And in 1989, a lot of work was done to fix up the area that we were in.  It’s actually a 4000 meter loop.  It allowed the defenders to guard the outer wall, and fall back to the inner wall if it was necessary. If the inner wall fell, it was a straight shot to Beijing for the barbarians.

We had two choices when we go to the wall. Take the “easy” way to the East, or the “difficult” way to the West.  We went West, of course. And it was difficult. Not only was it almost straight up, but the snow was packed on the stairs and it made it very slippery.  Ginseng (our tour guide) told us that it was 1700 steps to the top of the hill.

Visiting any historical spot is interesting.  Thinking of all of the lives and events that passed that place before you provides a stick with which to measure yourself against.  We had never been to anything as old as the wall. It was an amazing experience, even with the clouds and lack of vistas

We didn’t make it up as far as we would have liked.  The stairs were treacherous and our allotted time was short.  We turned back thinking it would take longer than it did to get back to the bus.  We made it back with time to spare, so it’s too bad we didn’t keep going to the top of the hill. However, there weren’t any pictures to be had up there. We were walking in the clouds by the time we did stop.

After dinner, we paid $30 each for a full body massage.  It lasted one and a half hours.  I even had my ears massaged.  The back massage was intense and the foot massage was 45 minutes on its own.  It was a steal and well worth it after a trip across the world and a plethora of stairs at the Great Wall.

What a cool day.  Check out the pictures and let us know what you think. Oh, and if you have a specific question about something, let us know.  Our heads are being packed with useful and useless information by Ginseng, so we might just have an answer for you.

Enjoy your Thursday! Ours was great.

Aaron and Denise

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Aaron’s Note: These posts were written during our China tour with a group from the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce in November of 2009.
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
We left the house to begin our voyage to the other side of the world at 12:00 EST on Monday. At 6am Beijing time on Wednesday, the trip was finally over. With the time change and the International Date Line, it can be hard to figure out exactly what that means in terms of hours. It was 29 long hours to get here.

It’s a long travel day, but considering you get off the plan 15,000+ miles from where you started, it’s something of a minor miracle.

The trip was fairly uneventful, apart from a long delay in Chicago. We were supposed to get to L.A. at 5:30 local time and meet with Aaron’s cousins and Denise’s aunt, but it was not to be. We sat on a plane at Chicago waiting for the cargo door to lock for about 3 hours. They scrapped that flight and we had to wait another couple of hours for the next plane to leave

All told, we were about 5.5 hours late getting to L.A.

By the time we made it to the Air China counter, we had missed our tour group and had to get our boarding passes and make it through security on our own. We hurried up and waited at the gate for two hours before the plane to Beijing took off.

Denise was able to sleep for most of the way. Aaron was happy to get six hours of sleep. It takes a lot of patience to travel 29 straight hours where almost all you do is sit, but we finally made it to China!

One initial impression is that China does things big. I guess it’s like Texas in that way. The walk from the gate to the immigration entrance was definitely over a mile. Then we took a five minute train ride to where our baggage was. The terminal was cavernous and almost seemed empty. It was like they had an excess of space to work with, but not nearly enough to fill it with. It was certainly impressive, but lacked that charming, provincial innocence of the Kent County International airport.

We found our bags (yay! They made it!) and cruised through customs to find out tour guides waving big signs with our bus number. We checked in with Ginseng (yup, that’s the “English” name his professor gave him in college) and waited for the fun to start.

We rolled out into Beijing traffic around 7:30am. There is an absurd amount of new construction happening. Ginseng joked that the national bird of China is the (construction) Crane. The city is vast; it was hard for us to keep our bearings as we cruised along the busy streets on our way to Tiananmen Square. Ginseng had loads of interesting and insightful information for us to try and take in as we walked along the square. Aaron wasn’t able to really pay too much attention. Fatigue combined with a biting cold kept him from retaining any of the cool information that was pouring in. Denise was busy snapping away. Check the pictures for a better description of what we say.

We marched along with our group to the Forbidden Palace. It was built in the early 1400s. Walking where once only Emperors and their families stood was surreal

The wood work was intricate, the stone work exquisite, and the architecture was inspiring. Denise took some great pictures, which you can see in the photo gallery with this blog.

The sightseeing stop was just sort of passing time until we hit lunch and went back to the hotel. I think Ginseng realized we had spent too much time earlier in the tour of the Forbidden City, because he stepped on the gas as we came through some of the residences and the Imperial Garden. It was too bad, as the garden was amazing. It would have been nice to spend more time there.

Regardless, it was nice to get back on the bus and out of the cold. It was about 11am now and we were off to our first Chinese lunch. We went to a dumpling restaurant, and it was pretty good. There were about 12 different dishes that came out. Aaron tried one of each item. He thought about half were really good, a quarter were not too bad, and the other quarter was not at all to his liking. Denise stuck with white rice, but did try a vegetable. It was not to her liking.

After noon, we headed to the hotel for a shower (much needed) and a rest. We were determined to not go to sleep until after dinner in order to force ourselves into the new time zone

In that, we were successful. However, having slept just 6-8 hours in the last 48 was starting to take its toll.

We went to an acrobatic show at six. All of the performers were very young and very talented. It was in a small auditorium, and although the act was impressive, it felt like a high school talent show because the production values were low.

We ate some food after that. There was rice and other things. Frankly, it’s all blending together. This is certainly a poor way to end the note, but we promise to be better reporters after we’ve gotten some sleep!