We woke up Sunday morning feeling much refreshed and ready for our Beijing adventure to begin.  Opening the curtains, we had a view of tall buildings with red and gold Chinese characters down the sides, and of bicyclers, buses, taxis, a few cars, and bicycle carts making their way down the tree-lined streets.  The skies remained quite hazy while we were there, but plenty of sunlight got through, and judging from some of the postcards I bought, it is not a permanent condition.
 

     Breakfast was included with our hotel room, and we ate out in the inner couryard and really felt like we were in a 5 star hotel (which was much better than hearing about it the night before).  There was a mix of American and Chinese food available buffet style - omlets and French toast made to order, scrambled eggs (rather soupy), ham, bacon, fried potatoes, watermelon slices, cantalope, canned fruits (many of which I didn't recognize), steamed buns, fried rice and spring rolls.  In three corners of the courtyard there were several marble stautes of semi-clad women with amazingly pert nipples.  Willow named three of them Faith, Hope, and Charity, another Prudence, and the one who was actually clothed, Lola.  In the evenings, we could hear string quartets and sometimes opera singers performing in the courtyard, although their fondness for the "beer barrel polka," "pearly shells" and "beautiful dreamer" gave us a few good laughs.
 

     By 8 am we were climbing into buses with our water bottles, cameras, and sunglasses.  Willow had the foresight to claim the front seat for us on that first day, so we had a great view of the city and countryside everywhere we traveled.  The first thing that stood out to me was the number of people on bicycles - usually the outer lanes is devoted to bicycle traffic.  The taxis are red - a lot of things are painted red in China, as it happens, because red has been considered a lucky color since ancient times.  The buses are electric, and are connected to wires that run overhead, which I'm sure made a great contribution to air quality.  This doesn't seem to hamper them much in pushing their way through traffic, however.  There are some traffic signals, and once or twice I saw a few human traffic directors, but other than that, it can best described as a continuous merge.  There are no lanes, and if you want to turn left, you just edge your way left and turn when you have or can make yourself an opportunity.  No one goes very fast, and drivers are much more patient than westerners would be.  We saw very few accidents.  It was all fairly cooperative, though you had to be a bit assertive or you would have been waiting forever.  Horns are used liberally, but for communication rather than emotion - to let someone know you were moving in, or on less crowded roads to warn bicycles that you were coming up behind them.  It was all quite fascinating, and a frequent topic of discussion on the bus.  After seeing what traffic was like, it came as no surprise that foreigners are not allowed to rent cars in China.

There is actually a little bit of English scattered around on signs and the sides of buildings, but almost everything is in Chinese.  I had not realized that although there are different dialects of spoken Chinese languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese, they all use the same characters, which has been a strong unifying influence throughout Chinese history.  At first they were as alien as hieroglyphics, but Willow knew a few of them and tried to find ones she would recognize to teach me.  When we exhausted her small repertoire, we drafted Jio as our teacher, and whenever she wasn't talking on the microphone about the places we would be visiting, we were having her teach us some of the simpler signs that appeared to be somewhat common.  On Sunday we learned the characters for China (middle + kingdom/country), mountain, mouth or opening (which was part of the word for exit and entrance on the highways), people, and three. (If only I could figure out how to get these characters into this document, I would show you!)
 

     Our first stop was the Ming Tombs, which are preceded by a long alley called the Sacred Way.  After passing by all the stalls full of people trying to sell lace umbrellas, T-shirts and trinkets (capitalism has certainly taken hold around tourist attractions!) we entered by way of a two-roofed pagoda.  Inside is a large stone turtle with a pillar on its back covered with Chinese characters on one side and Manchurian characters on the other side.  The turtle is considered one of the nine sons of the dragon, each of which had a characteristic ability or duty.  Unlike the western association of the turtle with moving slowly, in China it is thought of as being able to bear heavy weights.
In a way, once you've seen one pagoda, you've seen them all. They are really quite similar, as if there was one big one somewhere that the rest are all modeled on.  The walls are always red, though the roof colors vary a bit - here they are yellow, since yellow is the imperial color and these are imperial tombs (no one else was allowed to use bright yellow - maybe that's why Chinese people tend to use a lot of it in clothing now).  There are variations in the number of roofs - usually there is a pagoda with one roof at the beginning or front of something, then two, and then three.
 

     The Way is guarded by a succession of stone animals, followed by ministers, priests and warriors.  There are two pairs of each animal, one standing and one seated - before we got off the bus, Jio told us to try to guess why.  If I understood correctly, the idea was that they were supposed to switch off which pair was on guard.  She joked that if we came back the next day, the opposite pairs would be standing.  Some of the children climbed onto the camels and such to take pictures - none of the people taking care of the grass and shrubs seemed to mind.  The Way was lined with bright green willow trees in which hundreds of cicadas were singing, adding a distinctive texture to the place.  It was already quite hot, and after walking along the Way we were glad to get back on the bus where there was some air conditioning.  Below is a picture of Willow beside one of the stone dragons.
 

The tombs themselves are several miles down the road - the entire complex is housed in a valley with mountains on the north, east, and west, open only on the south, which was considered a good arrangement. After going through a one-roof pagoda that mainly serves as an entrance-way, we found ourselves in a walled complex with lovely gardens and very pleasant, relaxing Chinese music. There are three arched doorways in the entrance - one for the dead emperor (in the middle), one for the successor (on the left), and one for the other government officials (on the right).
     In the center of the complex is a large two-roof pagoda surrounded by stone terraces and colorful flags.  I noticed that the terraces have carved animal heads in each level with mouths that look like spouts.  I couldn't tell if they had been fountains at one time, or if they were just elaborate rain gutters.  The building is supported by 32 enormous wooden pillars from a rare type of tree that is naturally dark brown and very hard.  Display cases around the inside walls exhibit various artifacts found in the tombs - golden vessels, embroidered silk, elaborate armor, and the famous pheonix crown.  We learned that the dragon is used to represent the emperor, and the pheonix represents the empress.  In the center is an enormous statue of Buddha, with a large plexiglass box in front of it about half full of paper money.
 

Here is a view of the eaves under a pagoda roof - they are all quite similar, with blue, red, and green decorations, and complex shapes and lattices.  In the center of the upper lintel are a pair of golden dragons - this seemed to be rare except in the forbidden city, where they were everywhere.  There is usually some netting to prevent the ever-present swallows from nesting in the eaves.

At one of the doors to the building was a Chinese young woman dressed in beautiful white costume.  Willow saw her talking into a small black cell phone and thought it would make a wonderful picture, but she didn't get there in time and wasn't able to persuade the girl to pose with the cell phone.
 

After the middle building, there was another small arch with astonishingly blue decorations on the lintels.  This picture includes a Chinese tourist who is posing for a picture being taken by his wife.  There were many Chinese people at all of the sites we visited, apparently from other parts of the country - it was gratifying to see that they are able to see and appreciate their national treasures.  Inside the arch you can see a step inside the doorway - these are everywhere, and were intended to prevent demons and evil spirits from entering (we always referred to them as demon barriers).  Behind the small arch is the largest, three-roofed structure.  We went in and up through a large tunnel to walk around the outer terrace which overlooks most of the complex.  There were lots of trees and gardens and benches where you can sit and relax.  As with most of the other sites we visited, many people who live in Beijing obtain long-term passes and use these large open areas to do their morning exercises (tai chi, etc).  I always felt a bit bad that we never made the effort to get up early enough to see this.

After leaving the tombs, we went to a government-run jade factory.  At the entrance we were given a little card with a picture on one side and a place for them to write in our purchases on the other.  A "special gift" was offered if you spent more than $100.  The procedure was to mill around and decided what you want with the help of sales people behind the counters - they then wrote down how much you should pay and you took it to the cashier, paid, and brought it back to pick up your merchandise.  This was standard procedure for everywhere except the open markets, and I began to suspect that perhaps it was the way everyone shopped, sort of like the tales you hear about standing in three lines to buy something in the former Soviet Union.  I bought a pale green dragon shaped pendant for 35 yuan, and a dark green ring for 80 yuan.  Willow bought a jade ball, which has several spheres with round holes inside it that move independently - it rather boggles the mind to imagine how it was carved. There were lots of very intricate and beautiful pieces - large model sale boats with interlocking chains seemed very popular.  There were also lots of bracelets and small animal figures.  I had my eye on a cute turtle, but then I decided that I was tired of buying things that were just going to sit on a shelf rather than be worn or used.

Before shopping, though, we were treated to a brief show and tell about what jade is and how it is worked. They showed us some of the native rock, which is white and chalky-looking except for the bright, thick vein of jade running through the inside of it.  Workers carved it by using tiny drills cooled by streams of water.  The value of jade is determined by how clear it is - the more occluded, the lower the value.  Most of it is green, but we also saw a large statue made of a dark amber jade.  There are several tests to know if something is real jade or just colored glass - one is the distinctive high-pitched clinking sound made when two pieces of jade touch.  You can also look though it in the sun and see the milky texture inside the jade.  The most dramatic is to take a human hair and hold it against the jade and put a flame on it - jade has such good heat-absorbing properties that the hair won't burn.  Jade was thought to have magic powers of healing and warding off evil spirits.  In Hong Kong Willow saw small children even of poor families who had jade bracelets to protect them.  Chinese people also used to use jade pillows - small, rectangular pieces of jade were sown onto one side of the pillow.  Our bus driver had a pad for his seat that had circles of jade in it.
 

Finally it was time for lunch.  We got back on the bus and headed to the Friendship Store, a unique department store-like place run by the government exclusively for foreign visitors.  We were seated ten to a table and food was placed on a turn table in the middle.  Most of the meals were quite similar - they began with cold slices of meat and vegtables (which I almost never liked because they were usually pickled or something), which was then pushed to the middle of the table to make room for the platters of rice and a large variety of things to put on it.  Of the ten or so dishes, there was usually one that was spicy, and one that was sweet and sour (neither of which I care for) but usually three or four that I really enjoyed.  Tomatoes and scrambled eggs, soy flavored dishes with thin strips of chicken and vegtables were common.  The plates or bowls provided were very small, which was helpful for eating different dishes and for picking them up and using chopsticks like a shovel - imitating native practice.  Soup appeared toward the end of the meal, but it wasn't until the Peking Duck dinner that I tasted one that I liked.  On the last day, our table dubbed it the "abominable fish and spinach soup," and only one of the brave young men gagged some down.  Last but not least was fresh slices of watermelon that always tasted like heaven to me.  Forks were available to Americans who looked like they were really struggling with the chopsticks, but I did fine and enjoyed using them, although I often had to switch hands to relieve cramped fingers.  Willow was of course quite practiced from the time she had spent in Hong Kong.  One small glass of Coke a Cola, Sprite, or bottled water was provided per person - we always ended up buying more.  Both Willow and I drank water like fish during the day but never needed to use a restroom outside the hotel - that tells you something about how hot it was and how much we were sweating.

After lunch we did some shopping in the friendship store, which has a little bit of everything, most of it out of my price range.  After much deliberation, I bought a silk robe that was dark blue and had a yellow and orange dragon embroidered on the back of it for 470 yuan.  When I got back to the hotel and put it on, you won't guess who I immediately reminded myself of - Duncan MacLeod!  We referred to it my Duncan MacLeod robe for the rest of the trip.

After buying some more bottled water (having underestimated how hot it would be!) we climed back in the bus and headed to the Great Wall.  The wall stretches hundreds of miles, and is supposed to be the only man-made structure visible from space.  The section that we visited is quite impressive in the way it goes up and down the mountain ridges looking rather like a very long dragon, which I'm sure was not lost on the ancient Chinese.  They let you in at the bottom, and you can climb along it (up and down but mostly up) until you reach a high point that overlooks a lot of it.  Willow made it to the fourth gate.  I got to the second to last gate (I lost count), but this turned out to be a dead end, and you had to go back down and then up again to get to the last one.  I didn't feel exhausted, but my calf muscles were getting quivery so I decided not to venture further.  On both sides of the road leading up the the wall and inside all the gates (though less as you got higher) were people selling stuff, and I ended up buying a package of mediocre postcards for 10 yuan, a really dumb little plastic model for one dollar (well, it looked sort of cool at the time, but after the fact . . .), and a dark blue T-shirt with a picture of the wall that says "I climbed the Great Wall" in Chinese.  They had them in English, but the guy I was talking to was out of that color in medium in English, so I said, what the hey, characters are kind of cool.  Willow bought a cloth hat that folds up like a fan and can also be used as a fan just like many of the Chinese were wearing.
 

If I had to pick my favorite place that we visited in Beijing, I think the Great Wall would be it.  It had a sense of antiquity to match the feeling I had in Israel and Egypt, whereas almost everything else we saw dates to the Ming dynasty, which was round about the 1400 or 1500's.  It was hot but there was a strong wind blowing (enough to blow a hat off your head) that made it bearable.