On 12 Dec Saturday, we met at the lobby of our hotel at 7.30am and set off on the bus to the Great Wall of China. The journey was pretty long so it was a good time for many of us to catch up on our sleep, having been tired out from company visits, networking sessions and late nights out over the week. :o)

There was a lady tour guide who was on the bus with us so she gave us an overview of the history of the Great Wall. All I know (and remember) about it is that the Great Wall was built by the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, and that it’s 6000 km long. Right? :o)

We were taken to a place to look at some Jade products, but I don’t think any of us bought Jade there. However, we did learn how to distinguish real jade from plastic and glass imitations. =) Then we were brought to the foot of the Great Wall where we had to walk a little to get to the sliding car terminal to take the sliding car (an extremely slow and relatively unexciting version of the roller coaster) up to the Wall. The view was fantastic and so was the wind, albeit too cold to hold your face to it for more than 5 seconds. :oP As usual, there were cameras snapping here and there.

Since I did not have a camera of my own, I basically jumped into my friends’ shots and took pictures with them. Lol. ^.^ It was an experience not to be missed since we were in Beijing in WINTER and I wouldn’t miss the trip to the Great Wall for anything, even though I was quite tired and I wished it was summer instead. :oD After the Great Wall, we took the bus to the Forbidden City where we were left to wander around on our own. One of the iLeaders, Zhu Ke, had a friend in Beijing, Shi Yao, who took some of us to the Zhong Guan Cun e-plaza to get some electronics. It was then that I purchased a cheap and simple nokia phone since my cheap LG phone which I bought in Sg specially for the trip, dropped into the toilet bowl within the first few days we were in Beijing. =S

Two of the guys - Li Ren and Benjamin bought iPhone lookalikes which we have termed the “uPhone”, for 500 RMB which is a pretty good deal for a phone like that. :o) That evening after getting our stuff, we went to this place called “Wang Fu Jin” with some pretty good street food and met the rest of the iLeaders there. There was so much to see, so many different types of food to try and so many things to buy.  We had hot meatball soup, vege wrap, candied haw and strawberries, pork and chicken satay-like things, tako pachi-like snacks, burger-like meat buns and we even tried fried scorpions!~ ^.^ Yum!

But that was not enough! Zhu Ke’s friend, Shi Yao, brought the whole bunch of us (about 12 ppl) to the small lane near his university (Sports University) for street bbq where we sat on small stools at low tables and warmed our frozen hands with the heat from hot coals in long metal trenches on the tables. :o) Beer and bbq was what we had for supper that night, and I must say it was the company we had that made the food taste so good. =o)

Nat ^.^

Tags: bbq, great wall, sightseeing, street food

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 4:57 am and is filed under Beijing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.