redundantly redundant: Great Wall, Korean Tourist trap, 13 Ling Imperial Tomb

Here we are up at the butt crack of dawn at what is a part of the Great Wall of China. One of the wonders of the ancient world. I remember loving the 7 Wonders. The other six, that I grew up with at least, are the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Pyramids of Giza, Roman Colosseum, the Colossus of Rhodes, Stonehenge, and I think the Mayan ruins or Taj Mahal? I have no clue how that became my seven because that's like a mish-mash of various 7 wonders lists.

The tour guide said there were two routes to choose from: the Crowded route and the horribly steep route. Who wants to go on a crowded route?

Ascending up the wall...

Holy crap this is getting ridiculous.

The steps are becoming 3-4 bricks high.

Wait for meeeeeee!

In Chinese, the Great Wall is called the Chon Chun or "Long Wall." My joke is that we climbed the "Gao Chun" or "Tall Wall."

*pant* *wheeze* *gasp*

From the guard tower. That's quite a commute but guess what? It sure beats working in a cave!

Finally I reach a flat section, but that's as far as I go. In a trend of ever lame scheduling by the tour guides, they didn't give us much time here.

Maria musters some energy to do a Beijing Huan Ying Ni dance.

Check out the mini-comic me and Maria made.

So we actually came down the wall at the perfect timing as it started to rain. Rain + super steep wall + many 70+ year old seniors. It was a miracle everyone made it down ok. Shirtless dude = uncomfortable laughs.

Time for a snack of spicy duck parts!

Spicy duck wing. I approve!

So we were rushed out from the Great Wall so we could come to this Korean tourist trap. This mess hall was filled with Korean tourists and school kids. It was weird that we ended up here.

Yeah, it wasn't looking to good.

The rice was not very warm and was super sticky/clumpy/overcooked. Nothing tasted good. How bad? Well I said, wow, not even worth photographing.

Hands down, worse meal ever. Or of the trip. I can't recall a meal so bad in the last 10 years so let's just say worse meal of the century.

Spicy duck parts to the rescue! Thank you David!!!

Spicy seaweed. So as a meal as a whole, these guys saved it. They were awesome and spicy. Worse meal title applies to the food we were served.

Spicy duck intestines. Also very awesome.

And we rushed from the Great Wall for crappy food and 90 minutes of lame tourist trap shopping?!? Obviously there was some sort of kickback conspiracy going on here. We were not very pleased.

Maria, tired and slightly under the weather. The staff started yelling at her in Korean. Added lameness.

Next up in the lamest day in Beijing was a stop at a foot massage place which most of my clan fore-goed. These places are notorious for "doctors" telling you that you have all these medical problems not too dissimilar to doing "cold readings" and then sell you a bunch of medicine. Here is a small museum like hall which helped kill like... 30 minutes. Did I mention we got stuck at this place for like 2:30 hours. Aren't we all glad we left the Great Wall in such a rush?

So Chinese medicine has all sorts of various remedies. The legend is this funny looking dude tasted over 1000 herbs and stuffs so that's how they know so much about it.

The uncle Xiao Guan experience of the foot massage place.

Wonderful, now we arrive at 13 Ling Imperial Tombs and it's almost dark. Sure glad we spent all that time shopping and at the massage place. >__<

David actually warned us that this place was incredibly lame. This scale model is kinda cool to look at...

These elephant stools are kind of cool...

This gold bowl looks like a neat still life subject...

Trees growing out of walls?

Hey, look! A cool path along the wall. Sorry! We no go. Sigh...

Oh, a cool tomb entrance? Sorry, no go.

The trees were starting to change into nice colors.

and then the tomb. This was about as good as it got. It was really super lame and resembled a subway station. The lighting was all flourescent and the artifacts looked like boxes that just came out of storage. The tomb portion was capped off with a 5 story staircase. How delightful.