Photos
Right, I'm copying hulamoth, who did this last year... I think? and going for a 30 photo meme, to share all the photos I've been meaning to share over the last year or so, as my backlog is rather ridiculous, and this way no-one has to rifle through hundreds of crappy photos to find a few good ones. Except for me, but as I took the photos, it doesn't make much difference.
So here goes.
It's not an amazingly interesting or cinematic start to these photos, and I don't have many amazing pictures of when we visited the Great Wall of China, and this is definitely far from the best of those I have. However, it is a great way for me to brag about my non-existant abilities, because this is a photo, looking down on where we started, about 1/4 of the way up the section of the wall we climbed. We had 3 hours to climb as far as we wanted, and come down; Claire and I went at a moderate pace, not expecting to get very far, and after about 2.5 hours, we were fairly near the top (nearer than we thought), about to turn around, when we passed our teacher coming the other way, who said he thought we could make it to the top and come down again in time. It took about 10-15 minutes to get to the top from that point. Of the 30 on the trip, about 10 reached the top, and we were the very last.
We briefly stopped to take some photos (and then were stopped again so that some Chinese Tourists could take a photo of Claire; she's blonde, pale and tall- it happened a lot over the course of the trip) then raced down the wall again, a wall which had taken us 2.75 hours to climb, in under 15 minutes so we were back before the time was up, and we actually passed some of the others in our group in the last stretch, so we weren't even last back. The steps were extremely uneven and steep, and I still don't know how I didn't break any bones, because we were sprinting back most of the way. It may sound like a stupid thing to do, but anyone who's met our exams officer, who was 2nd i/c on that trip, would know that getting your face smashed in because you were running down uneven 600 year old steps is infinitely preferable to getting a bollocking off her for being late (a point which was proven when we later got lost in a market in Beijing and arrived to the meeting point 20 minutes late).
A little history of the wall; I can't remember much, so I looked most of this up. It was the Badaling stretch of the Great Wall, that we climbed. It is the best preserved section of the wall, and about 70 KM from Beijing. It was built predominantly in the 15th/16th century AD by slaves, and I think (although I can find no verification of this on the internet, although I have, admittedly, only looked at the first 3 results on Google) that it is on the site of a section originally built in the 3rd Century AD, or possibly even the 2nd century BC, I can't remember.
Last thing; that is genuinely how bad the smog was. Some days the air was clean, some days it was much worse than this (I have comparison photos taken from our hotel room window on different days somewhere), but I didn't realise how dirty it actually felt until we landed in the UK and stepping outside was like stepping into an oxygen chamber. Or at least what I imagine and oxygen chamber would feel like, as I have never actually been in one. Although my old tutor room was a Chemistry Lab, and we did come in after lunch one day to find a slightly scary excess of oxygen hanging around after an A Level experiment involving breaking up an oxygen-containing compound which had not properly been controlled. I don't understand Chemistry so I have no idea what happened, but it was odd.
So here goes.
It's not an amazingly interesting or cinematic start to these photos, and I don't have many amazing pictures of when we visited the Great Wall of China, and this is definitely far from the best of those I have. However, it is a great way for me to brag about my non-existant abilities, because this is a photo, looking down on where we started, about 1/4 of the way up the section of the wall we climbed. We had 3 hours to climb as far as we wanted, and come down; Claire and I went at a moderate pace, not expecting to get very far, and after about 2.5 hours, we were fairly near the top (nearer than we thought), about to turn around, when we passed our teacher coming the other way, who said he thought we could make it to the top and come down again in time. It took about 10-15 minutes to get to the top from that point. Of the 30 on the trip, about 10 reached the top, and we were the very last.
We briefly stopped to take some photos (and then were stopped again so that some Chinese Tourists could take a photo of Claire; she's blonde, pale and tall- it happened a lot over the course of the trip) then raced down the wall again, a wall which had taken us 2.75 hours to climb, in under 15 minutes so we were back before the time was up, and we actually passed some of the others in our group in the last stretch, so we weren't even last back. The steps were extremely uneven and steep, and I still don't know how I didn't break any bones, because we were sprinting back most of the way. It may sound like a stupid thing to do, but anyone who's met our exams officer, who was 2nd i/c on that trip, would know that getting your face smashed in because you were running down uneven 600 year old steps is infinitely preferable to getting a bollocking off her for being late (a point which was proven when we later got lost in a market in Beijing and arrived to the meeting point 20 minutes late).
A little history of the wall; I can't remember much, so I looked most of this up. It was the Badaling stretch of the Great Wall, that we climbed. It is the best preserved section of the wall, and about 70 KM from Beijing. It was built predominantly in the 15th/16th century AD by slaves, and I think (although I can find no verification of this on the internet, although I have, admittedly, only looked at the first 3 results on Google) that it is on the site of a section originally built in the 3rd Century AD, or possibly even the 2nd century BC, I can't remember.
Last thing; that is genuinely how bad the smog was. Some days the air was clean, some days it was much worse than this (I have comparison photos taken from our hotel room window on different days somewhere), but I didn't realise how dirty it actually felt until we landed in the UK and stepping outside was like stepping into an oxygen chamber. Or at least what I imagine and oxygen chamber would feel like, as I have never actually been in one. Although my old tutor room was a Chemistry Lab, and we did come in after lunch one day to find a slightly scary excess of oxygen hanging around after an A Level experiment involving breaking up an oxygen-containing compound which had not properly been controlled. I don't understand Chemistry so I have no idea what happened, but it was odd.
