The Wall & Birthday Cake

Due to the way our round the world ticket works, we had to work out the dates for all our flights in advance before we left Australia.  We can change them but with a penalty of $80 per person – which obviously when you times that by 6 becomes kinda costly.  So the best we could do was estimate the amount of time we wanted to spend between flights and go with it.

We ended up with way more time in Beijing than we needed and so we were left cooling our heels, waiting for our flight day.  Not such a bad thing though, gave us plenty of time to investigate the sights we wanted to see at a leisurely pace (or not) and also spend a couple of days doing nothing but reading a book or for the kids – the dreaded fractions and grammar!!

We also worked on our French, which we’re learning as a family and generally sat around waiting for our clothes to dry (one of the disadvantages of having one set of warm clothes!!)

The highlights of the week were obviously our trip to the Great Wall at Mutianyu and of course, the youngest member of the tribe had a birthday. 

He also had a great day when we tripped over to see the Temple of Heaven.  It’s been cold the whole time we’ve been in Beijing, but this day was particularly chilly and the kids were not thrilled at all about going to yet another temple – but it wasn’t like we had a million other things to do and the temple is supposed to be quite magnificent. 

Typically it turned out to be another one of those Chinese double chargers – at a lot of attractions they charge you to get in and then once you’re in and have walked around for ages trying to find the good bits, you find out that the good bits are in fact behind another entrance gate with another ticket window..

We got stung like this at the Forbidden City and then at the Summer Palace decided to bypass this problem by buying the whole encompassing ticket, only to find it wasn’t worth it.  This time, the entrance ticket into the Temple of Heaven didn’t specify that it in fact did not give you entrance into the actual temple but only the grounds..  (Gets exhausting after a while doesn’t it!!)

So by the time we discovered this fact, we just couldn’t be bothered, thus explaining the lack of photos of the apparently magnificent temple on our webpage.  Michael made up for this by being very young, cute, blonde and therefore attractive to our fellow Chinese tourists who were milling outside the Temple in their massive flag-headed groups.  He pulled out his catchcry of Yi quai! for a photo and before we knew what had happened, he was handing me handfulls of notes and was having a grand old time.  This happened 3 times throughout the grounds and him, Caitlin and Ashlea made enough to pay for sundaes at Maccas (Georgie has refused to sell her image!)

One couple were taking video of all these goings on and actually had Michael start yelling “yi quai” on cue!  The man was slapping his thigh and doubled over laughing.

We were looking forward to our trip to the Wall and it didn’t disappoint.  It is a phenomenal feat of engineering built on the spine of a mountain range – we took a cable car to the top, it’s a very steep and long climb to the wall.  The wind chill was freezing and to the kid’s delight, there were still some patches of snow on the ground.  We walked around over the parapets and through watch towers for just over a kilometre.

We celebrated Michael’s 6th birthday by going out to have dinner at his choice of restaurant – which turned out to be Pizza Hut.  In China, Pizza Hut is an actual restaurant and is very popular. 

We didn’t know where to get a conventional cake, so he was quite happy with a chocolate muffin from Starbucks.  The girls from the hostel where we were staying, made up for it on the morning of his actual birthday by getting him some slices of cake.

And so, our trip to mainland Asia  came to an end when we jetted off from the space station like Beijing Airport, en route to Tokyo.