(no subject)
There are several tourist-accessible sections of the Great Wall. The most popular and easiest to climb segment is called Badaling. We didn't go there.
Instead we took a three hour drive towards the wall I think could be quite fittingly called the Staircase of Lost Longevity. It was pretty worth it though, as there were not many other tourists and the view was great.
However, there were plenty of Mongolian farmers looking to supplement their incomes by acting as informal tour guides--whether we wanted them to or not. Most of the people in the group reacted calmly, but a few got very nervous and started yelling at them (in English obviously, because the world is supposed to be /fluent/). The area around the Great Wall looks very much like the poorest strips of Beijing, minus of course the backdrop of endless scaffolding, apartment blocks, and highway.
But once you reach the wall, all you can see is this:
China is what you see and what you wish you hadn't, what I can't really bring myself to photograph: the squatter toilets, the horse-drawn buggies downtown, girls who wear ankle-length nylons with open-toe shoes, the hutongs slated for destruction, the sewage canal, the restaurant separated from the owner's house by a piece of cloth, the 24-hour construction sites, the illegal pool tables under the highway, the toddler picking through rubble and garbage, the tiny shivering puppies for sale on a busy sidewalk.
You don't have to like it. You probably won't. But if you are just going to try to scream it all away, then for fuck's sake stay home.