Yesterday we visited the Great Wall at Mutianyu. It was quite a bus trip and taxi drive to go there from Beijing (about 2.30hours in total). The walk on the wall and the view was magnificent. Since Mutianyu is this remote, most of the tourists don’t go there. They visit the wall at Badaling, which was like Disneyland according to some websites on the internet. (Check out the funny sign we had to read before we were allowed to get on the wall) The sun was very bright which made me sweat so much that I could almost swim down! Apart from that it also makes the pictures look a bit flat. (By the way all the pictures I post here about China are small JPG’s unedited straight from the camera. I hope that with some postprocessing of the RAW files they will look a lot better already, but this is something I will do when I’m back in Holland.)
Going down from the wall was a lot of fun, you could slide down on a toboggan, much like the way the ancient Chinese did in the end of the 16th century after finishing the wall…

(Safety is one of the first priorities here in China. Check out the third brake light which nicely lit up the interior of our taxi every time it braked)

After our trip to the great wall we went to see a Chinese Opera. Our western ears are really not made to endure this kind of torture! I have never heard anything like this in my whole life. Click on the wikipedia link above and listen to the audio samples, I guess they give you an idea (I can’t listen to them here since they are blocked). Everything was in Chinese and we were not able to make any sense out of the story that was depicted. But all in all it was a lot of fun to see the performance, and even more to see audience go wild after the actors squeeked out some very high notes.

Today was our last day in Beijing, tomorrow we will leave (at 5.20am!) for Yantai to vistit the family of Bin. I hope that I will have the possibility to access the internet there as well. Good night!