Monday, November 24, 2008

3

OK. Wow. The Great Wall. What can I say? It was amazing. Truly amazing. I climbed it, tons and tons and tons of stairs. I climbed an elevation of 1600 meters from where I started to the absolute top of the Great Wall. They talk in meters here. I have no frame of reference for the metric system. All I can say is that it was really hard to do. Am I right when I say it was 16 football fields? Or so? And that's straight up in the air, so it was far to walk, but that was just the difference in altitude when we started to when we got to the top. Mark, climbing the stairs at the Interchange Building was great practice. Some tourist from another group counted the stairs and there were 1650. Not sure how many steps at the Interchange, but it was 21 floors. Multiplied by 20 steps per floor, that makes about 400 steps or so? And this was in 20 degree weather (that's Farenheit) and SO windy! I know this is just a weird fear, but it felt like the wind was going to knock me right off the mountain. Apparently when they were building the Great Wall, when workers would die they would just build them right into the wall. So here in China they call it the Longest Tomb. We also went to the Ming Tomb today. I thought it was kind of boring. Then we went to the Sacred Way, and there were some cool statues all along this walkway. I got my picture taken by a few of them. We saw Chinese silk carpets and tapestries being made also. That was pretty cool. It takes 3 weavers a year and a half to make a 8 x 10 rug. And they sell for $6500 US including shipping. That made me sad because if you think of it, how much could the weavers make for a wage? Not much. They work for a year and a half, the factory makes $6500, even if the workers got to keep all the cash, it would be $2100 each for a year and half's work, but you know the factory keeps most of the money and the weavers only get a tiny portion of that. They make one square inch per day of carpet. The rugs were beautiful. Boy is this the math email or what? And my math is probably all wrong. Oh well. I'm getting another massage tonight. Yay - My legs are sore from the stairs. More later...

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