Today went OK for all of us. Katie is learning more English words. We have a couple inches of snow on the ground so far and might get 6-8" total by tomorrow. Thus far school is still in session.
After the visit to the cloisonne factory on our first full day in Beijing, we rode northwest of the city into the mountains to see the Great Wall of China. There are actually mutiple walls that have been built over the centuries, and no, you can't see any of them from the moon. We visited the Badaling site. The wall is very well developed here, with towers and places to shoot arrows from. The foundation blocks appear to be quarried from local granite, with the upper bricks being fired clay, I think. The well-trodden areas of the bricks were quite worn down. We rode a tram to the top of a hill to access a high point on the wall, which was a little scary because the door of the car did not close all the way. It was cold and windy, and people were still shoveling out from the massive snowstorm that hit Beijing a few days before we visited (most of the clearing efforts we saw were done by hand) . On the plus side, the weather helped reduce the number of tourists. A few of the tourists wanted to be in pictures with blonde-haired Kristine. The Great Wall was probably the touristy thing I most wanted to see in China. We were cold, but I'm very glad we saw it.
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