Well, It's About Time

I finally found myself on the Great Wall recently.  On the Jinshanling section to be exact.  My classmates and I boarded a bus on a Saturday morning to take a 6 mile hike along the wall.  The Great Wall is one of those things that I've heard about since I was about six years old.  Everybody that goes to China seems to visit it.  Frankly, it's hard to miss, at about 5,000 miles long, give or take a few dozen miles.  The first tie I saw was as awe inspiring as they say.  I wouldn't say it's especially tall, but the way it snakes over the horizon is beyond description.  It almost seems to slither into the distance.  They fail to mention that, at least at the part I went to, you have to climb about a million stairs to actually get on the darn thing.  Not till I actually stood on it did the sheer history of it sink it.  It was definitely a "pinch me, I'm dreaming" moment.  Overwhelming is a good descriptor.  The following pictures are just the highlights that experience.

A Cowboy on the Great Wall!  Turns out he was from Texas, go figure.

 The above picture requires a bit of explanation.  The man you see in the picture is Jonny Lieberman, Senior Features Editor at Motor Trend Magazine.  Perhaps you've heard of it.  I walking on the wall when I spotted the parking lot full of Bentleys you see below.  Normally, that many Bentleys wouldn't be out of place in China, but the fact that they were all different colors was a dead giveaway for me that this was no ordinary convoy (Is there such thing as an "ordinary" convoy of Bentleys?).  You see, the Chinese seem to like there Bentley's in two colors, black or black.  Nobody here is going for the baby blue beauty on the right side of the frame.  It all became very clear when I heard Mr. Lieberman's voice in the background.  I instantly recognized it from the countless YouTube videos he has made, and I have enjoyed.  Turns out it was what they call a press event, in which an automaker, in this case Bentley, gets together journalists from all over the world to drive there car and review it.  There were French, Russian, English, and American automotive journalists there taking pictures and videos.  We chatted for a while and he was incredibly nice.  We discussed, as you would imagine, cars.  Overall, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't the best part of the trip.  Oh, and the combined value of those five or six Bentleys?  Well over a million dollars here in China.

End of the line.  You don't to be able to read Chinese to know that you shouldn't be climbing over this wall.