Today it was time for some long-sought-for culture, one can only see so many markets as Rhys put it. Alex father was kind to let us borrow their chauffeur Henry so we wouldn’t have to do the tourist groups. We decided to head for a of Great Wall that was close to the Ming tombs. We decided to walk up and stroll around which despite the standard fog/smog gave a quite few spectacular sights.
It was very impressive and you could feel the breeze of history thinking of those poor mongolian barbarians which the wall was aiming to keep out of China. After a hour and a half we decided that we had taken enough photos and decided to go down.
According to lonely planet the slide down was a “total waste of money” (not that great review regarding the cost of 3 €) but I trusted Lotta’s (thanks preggie ;)) scribbled “yeah right” in the margin. Usually these kind of attractions mean low speed and painstaking security measurements, not in this case. When a sign said “slow down” I felt that it really was a good idea, it looked like a long tumbling down if falling over in a curve. All went well though and Laura caught a picture at the finish showing how dignified my descent was.

We decided to eat and had some awesome dumplings and a cup of rip-off tea Henry drove us to the Ming Tombs. It seemed that the old emperors wanted to be buried with style. I wasn’t very impressed to be honest, but I did find the sign at the entrance quite interesting.We decided it was best to follow despite the sensual effect a bunch of wooden coffin replicas had on us. Outside again Ulf and I realized that setting our cameras in “cloudy” mode brought some more colors to our photos. Well, it’s good to know when you get wiser. Rhys wanted to get back to Aria to chat with Bruce Li again but we decided that a cheap meal and some sleep was more what we needed.