IMHO In My Humble Opinion

Today we started with a quick trip to the Astronomical Observatory of Beijing, which is no longer an operational observatory but was operational for hundreds of years and has some very old astronomical instruments. It was basically a bunch of old iron astronomical instruments perched atop an old section of city wall with a nice garden around it.

The next stop was Zhu Di's tomb:
Zhu Di's Tomb

Zhu Di was the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, and the first to build his tomb in a valley just outside of Beijing which has a total of 13 imperial tombs. The main building at the tomb is basically a copy of the building at the Forbidden City, except for the fact that since it didn't burn down, it's still got the original Nanma wood pillars.

The big stop for the day was the Great Wall of China:
Great Wall of China
Me at the Great Wall of China

We had a choice of two paths to take. As our guide put it, we could either take the path to the right (the "hard" path), or the path to the left (the "harder" path.) From the bottom, they looked pretty equivalent to me, but that just goes to show how deceiving appearances can be: we ascended about twice as far going along that path as we would have had we chosen the less difficult path. It was a bit of a workout, which made the acupressure massage I had this evening a welcome event. (At $20 for an hour, it seemed more than worthwhile.)

The view from the Great Wall was incredible, and photographs probably can't do it justice, but these pictures should give a taste.

After dinner, we went to a Kung Fu show: no photography allowed, so no pictures of the performance, which was quite entertaining. On the way we passed the Olympic Village and the Bird's Nest stadium that was built for the Olympics last summer:
Bird's Nest
I would've appreciated getting a closer look at it (I could say that about a lot of the architecture here) but we were running a little late to dinner as it was.

Tomorrow we fly to Xian after spending the morning in Beijing. I can make no promises about Internet access, but I'll do my best...