Max Gets His Wish!

What a great day! We got up early--way early, but who's looking at the clock? We are on vacation. Our guide Jenny picked us up at 8:30 a.m. and we went to the Ming Dynasty. Very neat! Max had a great time, but all he could talk about was the Great Wall, about 5 times per minute. After the Ming Tombs we stopped at a Jade Museum. The pieces were out of this world. The first photo is of Max getting friendly with a large jade cat. The museum guide told us that this year the medals for the olympics will contain jade, jadite, being the hardest of the jades, will be in the gold medal. We saw a preview of the medals, and they look lovely. We went to lunch afterwards and had a wonderful family style meal. Max had to go to the restroom and he came back so excited. He had seen his first squatty potty! And had even used it, successfully. I wanted the opportunity to capture a sqatty potty on film, but unfortunately (or fortunately) the women's washroom had a standard potty. I'm sure I'll be able to get a photo of a squatty potty in the near future.

After lunch we toured a cloisonne factory. The work was exquisite, as it was with the jade. The people of Beijing are so talented. It defies explanation.

After the factory tour, Max got his wish. We were able to go to a part of the Great Wall. He was so excited! Believe it or not, we got to the top of this particular section. The Great wall was begun the year of 656 B.C. Work continued on different parts of the wall, and this particular section that we scaled was completed during the Ming Dynasty, or 1368-1644 A.D. It was a wonderful site. Max was disappointed that we couldn't travel all parts of the wall, but when you conider it is over 21,000 km long, we wacked off a good chunk.

Max fell asleep on our way back to the hotel, and so did Marc. I'm ready to follow but it is only 6:00 p.m. We want to be well rested, because tomorrow we travel to Nanchang.