Day 74 Beijing Great Wall - Shanghai

Monday, April 7th, 2008
So the park that I was talking about yesterday is called Jingshan Park. I had to look back at my ticket to remember the name. It has some interesting history behind it though, the hill located in the middle of the park overlooking the Forbidden City was actually man made by the dirt extracted from the moats.
We woke up early this morning so we could leave our hotel by 7:30am. On the agenda for this morning: The Great Wall of China. It’s about a two hour car ride there from Beijing, but then we go to the airport on the way back. We hit some serious traffic leaving Beijing this morning. Apparently the traffic is always that bad during the week, we just haven’t seen it because it’s been the weekend the only days we’ve been there. Even though we were a little stretched for time, our guide said that we had to stop at this brass craft place and get a tour. We didn’t have to buy anything but they give her some commission for bringing all of us to this place. She said we had to do it so she could keep her prices low, which they were, and she was a nice lady so we just went ahead with it. The place was actually really cool, they took us through a tour of how they make these hand crafted brass pots from start to finish. We still hurried through the whole thing so we could have more time on the wall.

We had heard some terrible things from people who climbed the hills/mountain up to the Great Wall so we decided to take the lift to the top. It was basically the exact same thing as a ski lift, I felt like I had to get my snowboard ready when we were about to get off. Anyway, we made it to the top in pretty good time and ended up having a little less than an hour and a half on the actual wall which was enough time to make it to quite a few of the towers. The Great Wall of China is pretty great! It’s huge and never ending. Not to mention that it’s located along the top of these mountains so it wasn’t easy to make.

On the way down we decided to take this shoot thing down, I can’t think of the name of it right now but it’s basically this long, winding tin slide. You sit on this little seat that lets you control how fast or slow you go as you’re sliding down. It’s really fun and you make it down in pretty good time. It’s bothering the heck out of me that I can’t think of what it’s called.

There was a small market at the bottom of the hill leading up to the wall where we could buy a variety of souvenirs. Either I’m getting really good at bargaining after our last few countries, or bargaining with them was really easy. Like getting “I climbed the Great Wall” shirts for $1USD. Can’t argue too much with that price.

Next stop was the Beijing airport for our flight to Shanghai. The Beijing airport is easily the largest airport that I’ve ever been in absolutely huge. We ended up getting dropped off at one terminal and had to take a free shuttle to a different terminal, but the second terminal that we went to was even bigger. It was kind of insane. Lucky us, once we got there our flight was delayed two hours. I would have loved to spend those two extra hours on the Great Wall instead of sitting in an airport, but there’s not much you can do about that. For the first time since I got off the plane in the Bahamas, I was actually able to walk onto the plane through the terminal. No bus or runway to walk onto. Needless to say, I was kinda pumped about it. We also had another in-flight meal that was pretty good, marking that two in a row.
So we got back to the ship later than we had originally planned, but the ship actually came into Shanghai 12 hours later than expected because of the fog. I’m SO happy that I wasn’t one of those people who stayed on the ship between Hong Kong and Shanghai. By the time we got to the ship people were just finishing getting off of it. So had we arrived in Shanghai on time, we would have had to wait for the ship to come in.
For our first night in Shanghai we decided to go all out in our suits that we got from Vietnam. David, Kevin, Jim, Chris and I all got nice and dressed up in our new suits and headed to the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Shanghai, which is apparently the world’s tallest hotel. We took the elevator to the top floor, the 87th floor where there was a nice restaurant. Unfortunately, it was all cloudy up there so we didn’t have a view of anything. I’m not sure that the sun ever shines anywhere in China, at least not during this part of the season. It’s kind of depressing! Anyway, as expected, the restaurant was really nice. We had to take 3 elevators just to get to the 87th floor. Also, when I say nice that I also imply that it was super expensive. We enjoyed living the high class for an hour, talking all sophisticated with our cover as ‘a group of venture capitalists from the US looking at purchasing a local software firm’ but everything was way out of our price range so we only stayed for about an hour. When we were leaving the ship people kept asking what we were so dressed up for so we told them that we had a business conference that we were going to attend. We started saying this jokingly, but I think some people actually believed us. It ended up being pretty hilarious. Afterwards, we walked around the area for a while, just checking out the nightlife then headed back to the ship. So much traveling really takes a lot out of you!