I must have left my invading army at home.

Ok, if I don't try to catch up now I'm never going to be able to.

Here are some pictures from Shanhaiguan and from Ghost Street last week.

7/8

So The Johnson City people and I woke up at 7 to head out to Laolongtou, Old Dragon Head, where the Great Wall comes out of the sea. We talked to a cab driver before realizing that we could pay half as much if we took the sanlunche, the 3-wheeled motorcycle taxis with covered seating areas in the back. The drive was interesting; we tried to get the two cycles to race and they obliged us to some extent. There's a strange coexistence of bicycles, pedestrians, motorcycles, cars, and buses on the roads in China. In the US I feel like car drivers get very frustrated by bicyclists on the road. Maybe because here they're more ubiquitous that doesn't seem to happen. Horns are constantly honking, but I don't think I've seen anyone get angry, besides that one cab driver who took us to Sanlitun. There's a sort of acceptance of delays and illogical, selfish behavior from those around you. It's actually a fairly sane way of approaching chaos.

The sanlunche dropped us off at the beach, rolling right up to the sand, and we started wandering. The wall runs right next to the beach for a ways before cutting out to shore, and we could see the famous pagoda-like guard tower in the distance. The beach was filled with people, tourists (all Chinese) and hawkers. There were motorboat rides, horse rides, God knows what else. There were also people fishing, clamming, and gathering seawood. Because the quantities involved were so small I assume they were for personal use. We had one tout start following us around. It's hard not to acknowledge that I speak some Chinese, so when people follow me I avoid eye contact and act frosty, giving one-word answers as much as possible. He never did really leave, despite my asking him to, so he probably wasted an hour and a half following us as we walked. I split up from the others (and the tout) and climbed up the embankment to the wooded area next to the wall to wander around a bit. It was barb-wired; the other side of the wall is a museum type site and they don't want people going over the top, despite the fact that I could have climbed from a couple of spots where the dirt came right up to the edge of the wall.

We met up with Scot and Catlin and decided to try to go around the wall as much as we could, but on the advice of Lonely Planet we declined to pay the $7 entrance fee to the museum. So we had breakfast of baozi, a lamb intestine soup that we mostly picked around, and soy milk. We decided to head from there to Jiao Shan, the first peak that the wall climbs, maybe 5 kilometers from town. So we started to ask cab drivers about the fare. Everyone's running a scam in China. The first cab driver wanted to sell us tickets in advance, and put me on the phone with his buddy. I guess the buddy was supposed to convince me that this was on the level, that he really worked with the official ticket sellers, but he was speaking to me in Russian, so it's hard to know. So we told the cab driver that we just wanted a ride, that we wanted to buy tickets at the site, and he quoted us 100RMB ($12.50) as his cab driver friends watched. I laughed, rather loudly, told him he was talking nonsense, and started walking away. He called out that he meant for two cars, but we kept going. I hope he lost some face. We passed this pond area with a giant crocodile statue, but what caught our attention was the two kids in human-sized hamster balls rolling around on the pond's surface. They zip them in, then inflate the ball using a vacuum tube. Tethers are attached to the balls, allowing them to be reigned in by the operators on shore. It looked like fun. We ended up asking a cop for directions; he told us we could take a bus to Jiao Shan, so we caught the bus and went to the end of the line, which wasn't actually all the way. So we then caught cabs for 8 each, bringing the transportation grand total to 22RMB. 100RMB my ass, and I've only been here a week.

So we bought the student tickets into the park, which were like 20 or 30RMB, and started climbing. The wall was restored pretty heavily, so who knows how authentic it was, but it felt neat walking up. It was very steep in places, sometimes ramped and sometimes in stairs of varying extremes of rise and run. Along the way were people selling things, of course; cool cast bronze lions that had open mouths and acted as garbage cans; and sheep munching grass on the slope up to the wall. After climbing a ways there started to be guard towers every so often. Nowadays they act as bottlenecks; you have to climb up and down ladders one at a time to get to the other side. The ladders had cages to prevent you from falling backwards, I guess, so for those of us wearing backpacks they were pretty irritating. Actually they were probably irritating for everyone... No one likes to wait in line (mob) for old Chinese grandmothers and young children to climb a ladder. As we went farther up, the wall crumbled more and more. Most of the other tourists (again, almost all Chinese) climbed stairs down to take the side path that had switchbacks and so wasn't nearly as steep. We powered on up the wall itself. At one point there was no way to go farther without climbing over a vertical wall, so that we did. After the barrier the stones were looser and there weren't any guard rails. We climbed until we hit a steel wall with the big 'No Entrance' in 4 languages, where we rested a bit, but after we saw a couple of people farther up we grabbed hold of the support beams and swung around the sign to continue to climb to the first summit. The view was only ok. It was really hazy, but you could see the wall snaking down to the bottom, dotted with towers along the way. It was a better experience of the wall than I'd gotten earlier in the day, and it left me hungry for more, maybe the Simatai segment (a world heritage site, but 100 miles from anything and so still not too touristy) or far out west in the desert where the wall crumbles into dust. I'd really like to hike the length of the wall, camping along the way, but I don't think that's in my immediate future.

Scot and Catlin had bailed a ways before the top (they had all of their camping gear in backpacks and had a harder time getting up), so we hurried down to meet them. The 3 of us had a train to catch, and we all wanted lunch. So I washed up a bit in the public restroom and we started negotiating with taxi drivers again. Almost everyone we asked wanted to charge a flat rate of 15RMB per cab to the train station, but we finally found one cab that agreed to use the meter and a little while another who offered to take us for 10. We all got lunch, typical family style, at a place near the train station. None of the dishes were great, but they were all ok. I had agreed to help one of the Johnson City kids try to get a ticket on our train (he needed to get back to Beijing), so I did that while Scot and Catlin shopped for snacks. We got him a ticket and hung out at the station eating dried squid and peaches. Our train was delayed, so Scot and I went back out for more dried seafood and fruit. When we got back and got in line we were told our train had already left, despite the fact that the sign over the gate still had our train number with the delayed departure time. So we ended up on a slower, more expensive, and later train, getting back at 10PM instead of 6 and paying an extra 15RMB each. Ah well. So I bought one of those folding train seats for $2 and we just hung out and waited.

The train ride back was long. We chatted up fellow passengers again, including one college English major who couldn't put together sentences or pronounce words. There was a group of very rich, spoiled Beijing kids playing the Chinese equivalent of Mafia, which was sort of fun to watch. We took turns sitting again, but this train was more crowded and there was more competition for the temporarily opened seats. So it was a long trip, and we were very tired by the time we rolled into Beijing at 10. When we left the station I was amazed to see so many people sleeping in the plaza. I assume some were waiting for trains, but others seemed to be homeless and trying to blend into the crowd. Maybe safety in numbers? Catlin and Scot raced off to try to meet up late with a couchsurfer they were supposed to host that night, the Johnson City kid caught his subway and I caught mine to as close to home as I could get before grabbing a cab. Public transport's pretty good in Beijing, but much spottier late at night.

7/9

Worked. Well, sort of. I'm not really being very productive right now. I'll get there. I met up with Patrick Rhine for dinner, who I hadn't seen in about a decade. We talked about life in general and walked around Ghost Street a bit, which was fun.

7/10

I had decided to get a harmonica, and after a lot of research online I'd tracked down a big music store on the other end of town. So after work I caught a bus to the subway and headed West. It was rush hour and the public transportation was packed; that made everything more interesting. I'd never been in the area around Jishuitan, so just walking around was fun. At first I stopped at a department store trying to find brown socks, but after looking around a bit I was put off by the astronomical prices (probably a fair bit higher than the States for things like clothes irons and pillowcases, which I was actively looking for, and ties, which I always look at idly. So I ditched the department store. The first of two addresses I'd found online was vacant, and I started to get worried that the trip was in vain, but I passed a small music store and went in to ask about harmonicas. They had 2 types, both big and Chinese style and not what I was looking for, so I kept walking towards my second address. Then, as I walked, all of a sudden every store on either side was music stores, maybe 20-30 at least. Some had all violins, others had these big, horizontal harp instruments, others had traditional Chinese flutes, some had electric guitars... everything you can imagine. I checked 3 stores, finding harmonicas at each one, before finally buying a 10 hole diatonic in C for $5. I probably could have bargained, but I didn't.

After that I was on a roll. I bought a lightbulb to replace the one that burnt out in my room, bought the wrong fluorescent tube to replace the one in the bathroom that was dim, found pillowcases, got a voltage converter, had lunch/dinner of tofu in sauce over rice, bought a couple of baozi and an eggplant pancake for later, found a honey-peach popsicle to eat as I walked... it was a shopping frenzy. I probably spent $22 in all; the only thing I couldn't find was some damn brown socks. So I went home, did apartment maintenance like cleaning my AC filters, replacing bulbs, and dusting surfaces (I wake up with a sneeze every morning, I've never had anything resembling allergies before and I'm on a campaign no minimize it). Then I sat down and found some youtube videos with harmonica lessons and started to play. I sort of wish that I'd bought a bluesier B flat harmonica at the same time since they were cheap, but ah well. I had planned on studying some Chinese and going to bed early, but neither of those things happened.