I know I have a dog/animal fan club out there, and it doesn't get much better than this big fluffy dog in this village we visited last weekend. I think he may have been half polar bear. He was so big and acted like a king; he was never walked, he walked us.
So now that China is industralising the urban rich need to escape the pollution and what not, so they go to the countryside. But the problem is that the countryside is still very poor; urban-rural disparities are increasing, as everyone is acknowledging (including the Chinese government ::cough::). Anyways, they've decided to create these little mountain hamlets where there's AC, hot water, karoake, even bumper cars so wealthy Beijingers can feel at home in the rural areas. They call it "The New Socialist Countryside."
While at the New Socialist Countryside, we climbed an unrestored section of the Great Wall. At times it thinned out to nothing more than a pile of stones-- and it seemed like we were walking on some stonewall in Concord, except for the deadly valleys on either side.
Since I have no other pictures of me, you've no option but to see me shake the flowers off this tree on the Great Wall.
Group picture atop the Great wall. That's our country coordinator, Hong, leaning over my shoulder.
After about two hours of hiking, we reached this tower. There were two main "types" of Great Wall-- the ones where the towers had three windows, and the other ones with four. The ones with three, such as this one, were constructed during the Qin dynasty around 220 BC. The Qin dynasty is often referred to as the "First dynasty of China," since the emperor Qinshi huangdi, united a bunch of the warring states and unified the Chinese script. He was a pretty cruel guy and his dynasty didn't last long, but he certainly left his mark on China. Interestingly enough, I think Mao admired him-- he sacrificed a lot (mostly, people) for "The Greater Good" of the nation.
In case you're curious, the four-holed towers were constructed during the Ming dynasty(1300? - 1644). Super cool.
These loudspeakers would go on at 6:30 AM and go on and on. I didn't bother trying to figure out what they were saying; that would've require too much effort. The propaganda was well salted with words like "MaKeSi ZhuYi" (Marxism), "GongChanDang" (Communist Party), "MaoZhuXi" (Chairman Mao), and "SheHuiZhuYi" (Socialism), so I think I can justify my laziness in listening.
Remember what I said about rich Beijingers?
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, (Monty Python, anyone?)
So I was looking to get some old Mao-era Chinese cameras, and found out about a camera market on the West Fourth Ring Road. Well, imagine a middle school-aged girl going to a mall. That was me yesterday. Except before I went in, I saw this crowd gathering, and all these (quite hideously-dressed) models just sort of milling around, and a bunch of people with their new fancy cameras taking pictures of them. I wanted to try to capture the oddness of the event, but I'm not sure if I did a very good job. Trust me though, it was WEIRD.
Afterwards, I went in, and saw all these cool cameras, including the one I posted a picture of above. It's a super rare rangefinder with an f-stop of 0.95 (I know, super nerdy, but really cool), a huge spanking lens. They had all these old cameras, of course I couldn't afford any, but I did end up buying two Mao-era rangefinders. I forgot to take pictures of them before I came here, but they were pretty neat little critters for not that much (about twenty bucks a pop). Who knows whether they'll work, I'm going to use them in South Africa so I don't have to carry around my big expensive digital camera. Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but I need to justify the purchase somehow, right?
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