The cow in Zhongdian, China.

I really didn’t know what to expect before we arrived at the Great Wall, and I have been greatly disappointed more than once in the past upon seeing famous landmarks in person for the first time. In the end The Great Wall of China far surpassed any expectation I had, and now gets my vote in the on-going election to name the new ‘7 Wonders of the World.’ See some photos from our walk on The Wall.

Chairman Mao (aka Mao Zedong), the leader of the Communist Revolution in China reportedly said, “You are not a man, unless you have climbed the Great Wall…and survived the swindling of the taxi drivers in Beijing.” Or something like that. Since Erick and I wanted to prove we were men, we not only climbed the Great Wall, we did it in our underpants…with temperatures well below zero….with broken glass in our shoes.

The Forbidden City, also known as the Imperial Palace is a structure of building located in the center of Beijing, last serving in its role as the center of the Chinese empire in the Ming and Qing Dynasties

Amongst traffic jammed streets and smog as thick as gravy, I sat sulking in the back of a crammed Honda Civic stuck on the interstate. My own excitement, that each new destination usually brings, had also evaporated into a thick haze: I was not happy.

The first lesson that we should have learned, was if approach by an English speaking guy insisting he has a taxi, when you are in the middle of a Chinese speaking city of 15 million, you should be a bit skeptical. Unfortunately, we were so taken off guard by the man’s miraculous appearance and his English, that we didn’t have any time to be skeptical before he whisked Erick’s suitcase away and was hauling us off towards the taxi line.

I smiled and just as I looked up, a man stepped in front of us. “Taxi! You need taxi?” he said. Taken so off guard by his abruptness and his English, we didn’t respond immediately and had only barely half-nodded, when he grabbed Erick’s luggage and started to whisk us away to what we thought was a taxi line, only to find we were about to learn our first major lesson on travel in China: “don’t say ‘yes’ to a con man.”