April 1st Beijing

The Chinese officials were a little slow in clearing the ship at Xingang, so we were late getting going on our tour. We finally left about 9 am.

If you think you live where there’s bad traffic – you cannot believe how bad traffic is until you’ve seen Beijing traffic!!!

As for quality of life, of course this is my opinion…. I think they build apartments, then live in them until they fall down, I don’t see that there is any maintenance done or much care taken. People seem to move very slow whether they’re walking, working, driving etc. Many times we saw lots of workers grouped together but half of them weren’t working, just looking around.

We visited the Ming Tombs (pic 1), ancient artifacts of the early Dynasties. But the highlight today was visiting the Great Wall. We climbed up a long way, eventually we’ll get some pictures posted (pics 2 &3). The steps are irregular, so you had to be very careful coming down.

Just as we got back down to the parking lot, a crazy storm blew in. It was driving rain with cold wind, everyone was running for cover. Luckily we were near another part of the wall and could take cover.

On the way out of town we past the Olympic village, the “Birds Nest” (pic 4) where the opening ceremony will take place and the swimming pool-very cool (pic 5). Our tour guide told us that everyone in Beijing will get 2 wks off during the Olympics. That way they can loan their apt to visitors as well as alleviate traffic.

We had a long long drive back to the ship and saw many accidents. Trucks were going between 30-50 mph on the freeway in the left lane, causing our bus to weave around all the traffic. It takes only 3 days of driver’s ed. to get a licenses and it shows. We finally arrived at 10:15, we were wiped out! And we still had to eat dinner.