Hutong is the Chinese word for alley, but it means
much more than that, as I soon find out. It’s Saturday, and I’m
on a group tour of the Qinglong (Azure Dragon
) Hutong.
The tour is in Mandarin, but a few friends translate the more
interesting bits for us non-Chinese speaking folk.
These alleys are between the traditional courtyard-style residencies of the people who live there. Often hundreds of years old, some hutong communities have come under government protection to prevent their replacement with high-rise apartments or commercial buildings. The Design Service Center of Beijing runs a program that encourages residents of Qinglong Hutong to create public art within the hutong to make it their own and promote community in the area. Interestingly, all hutong communities seem to be surrounded by brick walls, and all of them are painted the same color gray.
The tour guide heads into the alley, stopping here and there to talk about points of interest. The other non-Chinese speakers and I spend most of the following two hours looking around and taking pictures.
After about 30 minutes, I feel pretty lost. And hot. Fortunately I brought extra water, and our guide knows the way. Finally we return to the Design Service Center to debrief. Conclusion? Hutongs in China don’t live up to the bad reputation of alleys in the States. People are friendly and tend to keep to themselves, and while it may be a little crowded with junk and traffic, the rich culture of the hutong makes for a warm and fuzzy, homey feeling.
It’s the second Sunday, and we have most of the day off from the design program, making it the day to check out the Great Wall. We had all gone out the night before for karoake at KTV, and while a few others went clubbing afterward, Ken and I had left so we could wake up at 7 am for a full day of adventuring.
We meet up with Mandy and Jenny. They had nicely arranged for a carpool for the four of us to Mutianyu, a section of the Great Wall that is a little further from Beijing and therefore less crowded.
Tickets in hand, we walk past the gift shops (and a Burger King) to catch a bus. The bus careens up a switchback road to drop us off about a mile closer to the base of the mountain. We chuckle about the herd of people wearing bamboo hats, who appear to be part of a tour group.
There are two ways up the mountain: stairs and chairlift. I’ve just recovered from a bout of food poisoning three days ago, but I’m feeling pretty darn good this morning — and since the others want to hike up, I think, sure, I’m athletic, I’ll be able to handle it.
Handle it I do, much better than a number of other tourists. The weather is hot, above 90°F and humid, so the four of us are soaked with sweat not even a third of the way up. My 1.5-liter water bottle I bought this morning has sure come in handy, as halfway up, Jenny pays three times more for a bottle a third the size. But finally, after weaving through dense forest with an occasional view of the beatiful valley below, we make it to The Wall.
The bricks are huge. We climb thirty or so more stairs to get to the walkway along the top — from which we can see the entire valley on either side, lush with vegetation, and mountains in the distance. We stroll along the uneven square-ish cobbles, peeking through crenellations and exploring several towers. The wall just keeps going; we walk to the next tower, and then the next, and still we can see the wall zig-zagging across the mountain-top, continuing beyond the horizon.
yī èr sān qiézi!
Many, many times, whenever people are taking group photos,
we hear, yī, èr, sān, qiézi,
which literally translates
to, one, two, three, eggplant.
Just like the word
cheese
in English, qiézi
(roughly chee-ET-zeh)
makes you show your smile when you say it.
To get down from the wall, we could walk, take the chairlift, or ride a toboggan. We hike down, which is much easier than going up, but we catch a few entertaining glimpses of the shiny metal toboggan chute. The toboggans appear to be very minimal, and the signs we can see through the trees suggest that passengers are responsible for braking around curves.
Unfortunately, I don’t learn much more history than I already know (i.e. built to keep out invading forces), but my visit to the Great Wall gives me the perspective of how incredibly huge it is, as well as some empathy for its builders and the workers who still climb up to it everyday.