I woke up at about three in the morning realizing that my plan of using the cooking class to meet and tag along with other travelers was a bit of a failure so at just past seven in the morning I headed down to the front desk and booked the Great Wall tour at Jinshanling. There was one spot left. Score. I was told I needed to bring my own lunch so I headed out of the hotel in search of my hutong market. There was not an indoor market as there was in Dongcheng but a series of stalls with about a dozen vendors selling different foods from eggs to apples and live fish in tanks. I bought an apple and an Asian pear from a woman selling fruit from the back of a loaded tricycle. She weighed the fruit and pointed to the scale which read 2.78. I gave her three yuan. She handed me back two yuan and some change. The fruit cost me pennies. I almost refused to take the money back.

Near her stall was a line of folks waiting for fresh dough being fried in a wok. There were two chefs in the stall shaping and stretching dough while another fried the dough and third handled the customers. If there was a line it must be good. I bought two pieces of dough the size of an LP and a hard boiled braised in what looked to be tea.

I ate the first dough disk on my way back to the hotel. It was delicious, warm with an almost crisp exterior and somewhat chewy inside. Even with the dough I still managed to have the full free breakfast at the hotel before loading myself into the passager's seat of the minivan that would take us the two hour journey to the Great Wall at Jinshanling.

There were five others in the back of the van. I said hi to them before Joe our driver started threading traffic toward the outskirts of Beijing. For the first hour I sat in silence as I watched the expanse of Beijing eventually shrink from communist style concrete housing into light industrial and then to pastoral. I hoped no one in the back suffered from car sickness for once we left then main road the second hour was spent weaving around trucks along a serpentine road, passing small villages of brick and concrete all in a blur. As we passed each town, we were offered a glimpse of Chinese rural life on a Sunday in April. There was the customary blue uniform of the Chinese worker, some fishing in a shallow river, others hoeing by hand in a small plot along the road or traveling between villages on rickshaws bicycles brimming full of a day's, or week's, or month's labor.

Beijing was surrounded by mountains. You would not know that because of the smog trapped beneath them, but as we neared the hills of Jinshanling the sky turned from gray, to yellow, before breaking out into a brilliant blue. When we reached the parking lot below the Great Wall of Jinshanling it was nearly vacant a good sign compared to the throngs of tourists who go to Mutianyu, a thirty minute bus ride outside of Beijing. In addition whereas the wall at Mutianyu has been completely restored the wall at Jinshanling was a mix or restored and unrestored.

We left the van and made our official introductions. There was an older couple from Florida, a brother and sister team from France and a single woman closer to my age from Seattle. We made customary chitchat on our way up the trail toward the wall. Jim, from Florida owned one or more grocery stores, Raphael from France was a web developer living in Shanghai and Ann from Seattle was in Beijing to attend a global health conference as a researcher with the University of Washington.

The trail led up a ravine to a square flanked by cannons and a large statue of a warrior on a horse in the center. At the opposite side of the square was a wall, the Wall. We entered a doorway up some wooden stairs and we were there, on the Great Wall of China. Wall to the left of me, wall to the right, snaking in both directions, separating two sides of a mountain, China, from old Mongolia.

The first eleven towers were restored while the second eleven in route to Simatai were left in original condition. The first eleven towers were easy. The second required some skill as one step would be inches and the next measured in feet. It was also steep in sections following the cut of the mountain. The surrounding hills were brick orange scattered with brush possibly showing the first buds of spring. All in all the hike was near empty only to be interrupted on occasion by a merchant holed up in a corner of some of the towers, either offering soda, beer or other refreshments, or peddling souvenirs. How they managed to carry all that stuff up and down the wall I could not imagine. Certainly not an interruption, but occasionally we were passed by native Chinese dressed in full on Columbia sportswear, complete with brightly colored fleece, hiking pants, Columbia branded brimmed hats or baseball caps, and dual hiking poles. To me it looked completely familiar, yet totally out of place. For myself I was right where I wanted to be. There was something indescribable about walking the Wall. It struck me more than the Coliseum, or the Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty. It was the sheer size of it and the sheer emptiness of the surroundings. They say that they built the wall so that one person could ward off a thousand. It must have been lonely up there.

On the way back our driver Joe got into an accident. Right before we got to the hotel after several near misses twisting the alleyways back toward the backpacker's hotel our black minivan crumpled the rear panel of an Audi parked along the hutong. This forced us to get out and walk the remaining couple of blocks. I felt bad for our driver but it also scattered our group. The French siblings went off in on direction, the gal from Seattle, Ann unceremoniously headed back to her conference and I headed back to the hotel with the Floridians. Seeking a slightly younger crowd, I parted ways with them at the hotel entrance.

In the evening the hutong came alive with Chinese youth. I think I was one of the few people over thirty and from the looks of it most were pushing twenty if that. I followed the flow of traffic stopping to eat wherever there was a crowd. I dined on beef kebabs and then fried tofu with spring onions, cilantro and sesame. Both delicious. Another thing among many that I found enduring about the Chinese was that everyone took pictures of their food.