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Adventures in Beijing and the Great WallAfter the conference, I managed to spend a few days in Beijing with nothing particular to do. I stayed at the Marriott City Wall near the Beijing Train Station. There are lots of local shops, restaurants and food courts around. Equipped with the GPS from the cell phone and an offline map of China from an Android app, I wandered around in Beijing with confidence. I wandered into the hutongs (traditional housing with mazes of narrow streets) without getting lost. I even went to a portion of the Great Wall (Mutianyu) that is supposed to be, according to the Lonely Planet Guide Book, not well-visited (an oxymoron considering the population in China).  Beijing Train Station at night 
The Great Wall at MutianyuMay 1 is the International Workers’ Day which is a holiday in China. Since it was on Wednesday, a lot people took the week, and the weekend, off. I was forewarned about the crowds but how bad can it be since I was going to not touristy area. It took me a while of preplanning to figure out where to take the local express bus to go to Mutianyu. There was supposed to be a tourist bus to go there too, but nobody seemed to know anything about it. When I asked the hotel staff about either the local or tourist bus, they tried to direct me to hire a taxi/car instead. When I showed at the bus terminal on Saturday, I was not surprised by the long line. But it did not take that long to get on a bus since there was one every 30 minutes. Little did I know that getting on a bus was not the end of the story. The bus got stuck in heavy traffic, inside and outside Beijing. It took 3 hours, instead of an hour and half, to get there. While I was not happy, people on the bus just took it in stride. (I visited Korea after this. It is interesting to find out that while Korea is just as densely populated as China, but, somehow, traffic jam does not appear to be a big problem). 
Long lines at the long distance bus station The bus took us to a town Huairou from which I was supposed to take a minibus to the Great Wall at Mutianyu. I was one of the few people that got off at the Huairou bus terminal and I couldn’t find any minibus there. I was offered a taxi ride to go to the Great Wall for 100 Yuan, which I bargained down to 40. A couple blocks from the bus terminal, the taxi driver flagged down a couple of young female students and they got on the taxi too. Apparently they negotiated with the driver earlier and thought the fare was too expense. Now the driver offered them a better deal. Later I found out they paid 10 Yuan while I paid 40 Yuan. The taxi ride in the countryside was rather long, about half an hour even without much traffic. To play it safe (making sure that I have ride back to the bus terminal) I made an arrangement to have the driver to pick me up at 4:30 in the afternoon. The Great Wall is quite a hike up from the village Mutianyu. Because of the long line and traffic jam at the beginning of the trip, I gave up the original plan of hiking up and down to the Great Wall. I bought a one-way cable car ticket to go up to the Great Wall with idea of hiking down afterwards. 
A short cable ride took me from the bustling touristy souvenir shops at Mutianyu to the relative quiet Great Wall. One look at the Great Wall here convinced me the only way to go is up. So off I went, all the way to the top. The weather was nice – dry and cool. Unlike in Beijing, the sky was blue albeit there was a bit of hazy. 
Great wall goes on for ever along ridges with beacons
It was a good hike. I barely reached the top before hurrying back because I have to be back at the cable car station at 3 to make sure that I have enough time to hike down to Mutianyu to meet the taxi driver at 4:30. I did not bring enough money to cover both the one-way cable car down the mountain and the taxi ride. That was the plan anyway. When I got to the cable car station, I could not find any trail going down the mountain. Then I learnt from a local tour guide that the trailhead was a 2-hour hike down from where the cable car station was. For my hiking plan to work, I should have hiked down along the Great Wall when I got off the cable car this morning in order to have enough time to use the trail to go down the mountain. But I went up instead. Now there is no way that I could meet the taxi at 4:30 unless I took the cable car down. The problem was that I didn’t have enough cash. I didn’t plan on taking the cable car up and the taxi ride was more expensive that I expected. After buying the cable car ticket down the mountain, I won’t have enough money left to pay the taxi driver. But I have no choice since if I didn’t meet the taxi driver on time I am not sure that I have a way to get to the bus terminal. As I got in line to board the cable car, I was scheming away. I have to convince the taxi driver to help me find an ATM to get more cash. It is easier said than done in China. ATM that allows foreign cards are not common in China except in big cities. I have doubt there are these kind of ATM in Huairou and Mutianyu. It so happened that I got into a cable car with a Swedish family, two parents of my age, two adult daughters and a granddaughter. One of the daughters worked for Volvo and was in China training the Chinese personnel. They came to the Great Wall with a tour guide and a minivan. So I asked them if I could hitch a hike to the bus station. After consulting with their tour guide, they were happy to do that. Instead of taking me to the Huairou bus station, they took me all the way back to Beijing since the guide did not know how to get to the bus station. There was one minor mishap on the way back. One of the daughters was sick; she threw up several times during the trip. I was afraid that I would get sick which would be troublesome since I still have to spend 2 weeks in Korea. But I survived without getting sick. Later on I paid it forward as I stood in line to buy the Express Airport Express train to the Beijing Airport. Two French people thought that they can use credit card to buy the ticket and so did not have enough cash. In order to get cash, they have to get out of the line to find an appropriate ATM. I doubt that they have time to do that. So I gave them 20 Yuan for the ticket. HutongsHutongs are narrow streets and alleys commonly found in Beijing. The ones that I visited are been rebuilt. They are surprisingly clean. Unlike in the old days, I found public restrooms and bathrooms in every other blocks. Equipment with a cell phone GPS and an Open Street Map app on my Android phone, I wandered around in the maze without getting lost. 
Muslim DistrictI went to the a Cow Street Muslim district in Beijing. I visited an ancient mosque. Unlike the modern Arabic style mosques that we saw in Gansu, old mosques in China were built in the style of Chinese temples. 
Beijing 798 Art ZoneIt houses a thriving artistic community among 50-year old decommissioned military buildings. One of the buildings in the complex is Factory #798 and hence the name of the district. There are interesting indoor and outdoor exhibits. Part of the exhibits are rather commercial. But I found some exhibits are controversial (hard to believe they are being shown in an authoritarian country).
Buddhist Temple
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