The Long Wall

On our recent trip to China, we visited the Great Wall. Our guide informed us that the Chinese refer to it as the "Long Wall". I guess they're both accurate.

We didn't have the best weather for the trip there. Cloudy with rain. Not the sunny clear skies that I hoped would give us the best pictures of the wall. But when you have lemons...

This pillar is a quote from Chairman Mao, "You're not a hero until you've climbed the Great Wall." I guess I can check that block.



The section of wall that we climbed spanned a strategic valley that the Chinese were trying to protect. We started our climb in the low point of the valley and climbed up from there. In retrospect, I think we climbed up the wrong side. The other route was longer, but definitely not as steep. Here's the path we took:



And it goes on up from there. Once we were at the top (or at least as far up as we were willing to go) we had the obligatory family photo done by a passing Briton. It was fortunate that he was in the area. Believe it or not, most of the Chinese and Japanese tourists that we asked to take our picture had an uncommonly hard time operating our camera. They could never get the "press halfway, then press all the way" concept right, even though every digital camera that I've ever used has that same operation. Go figure. Regardless, here we are from the top of the mountain:



Finally, I've been having a lot of fun with the "panorama" mode on the camera, and this was yet another opportunity to play around with it. It was still a little cloudy when I took this, but the sky was clearing up and I brightened it up with some help from Photoshop. Click here to bring up the whole shot in all it's glory.




While I'm here, I wanted to see if anyone knew who I gotta know to get placed on the "Blogs of Note" on the front page of Blogger. Christ, if bluepulseblog and Budak in Berlin can get there, why not me? My content's just as good as those two hacks. Tell your friends about Fillet of Seoul and get me a mention.