Words of Mao Zedong: You’re not a hero until you’ve been to the Great Wall.

The second day of our group tour in Beijing started even earlier than the first — wake-up call at 6:15 a.m. But it was well worth it. We were going to the Great Wall! The section of the wall we were visiting — Juyong Pass — was about an hour’s drive outside Beijing and situated amid country villages and mountains that seem to shoot out of the ground at 45 degree angles.

When we stepped onto the wall, there was a stone tablet inscribed with the words of Mao Zedong: “You’re not a hero until you’ve been to the Great Wall.” With that gauntlet thrown, we of course had to climb the wall, which turned out to be much more strenuous than we imagined. The wall was as steep as the mountainside on which it was built. Even the stretches of straightaways between flights of steps were steep. We were feeling it after the first straightaway — and we picked the “easy” side! The flights of stone steps were steep and irregular both in height and width. It was difficult just to walk on them. I can’t imagine how dangerous and demanding it was for ancient soldiers and couriers to run up and down the wall.

With frequent rest, we made it past a couple guard towers and almost to the summit of our particular stretch before turning back. The climb back down was even more taxing than the journey up in some ways as we had to keep ourselves from falling forward. Fortunately, we kept ourselves upright the whole way down.

One of thousands of panels along the long corridor

In the afternoon, we went to the summer palace. It was a gorgeous and expansive garden spanning the grounds around Lake Kunming. Our favorite part of the garden was the long corridor that meandered through much of the garden. The ceiling of the entire corridor, both on the inside and out, was covered with panel after panel of beautiful paintings depicting scenes from various great works of Chinese literature or traditional folklore. It’s mind-boggling to think about the amount of work that went into decorating the corridor, which in itself could be an art museum that would take hours to visit.

Lake Kunming at dusk, frozen solid.

After the summer palace tour, we took a rickshaw ride through an old-style Beijing hutong neighborhood. It was interesting to see this side of Beijing, which is a complete 180 from the neons and highrises. Not all was traditional, though, as we spotted a little restaurant on the side of the street called Hutong Pizza.

Then came the highlight of the day for Courtney. On our way to the hutong tour, our bus drove past a market that included the cutest Starbucks in the world — in an antique-style Chinese building. However, our bus didn’t stop there, and the hutong rickshaw ride took us near there but did not stop close enough for us to go. We had made peace with the fact that we had to be satisfied with just seeing it in passing when fate intervened. Just after we had gotten back on the road after the hutong tour, the tour guides realized that we were missing one couple. The bus had to do a U-turn and stop. And as if it were predestined, the bus pulled up right in front of the Starbucks. While the tour guides went off to search for the missing couple, Courtney and I raced off the bus, ran to the front of the Starbucks, have Courtney pay homage to her shrine, snapped a few pictures, and ran back on the bus, just in time for the tour guides to come back with the missing duo.