The Great Wall sprawls on and on… still the most impressive thing I have ever seen built by man. Four horses can go side by side while walking along the walls. I thought of all the European castles I have built where I would be standing on a wall and thinking, at the time, wow, this is really a big and impressive castle. But then one day you make it to the Great Wall and you think back… wow, I was really kinda out of the loop on this whole magnitude issue.

I went ahead and bought a cardboard sheet of dried fish even though I was not hungry. It was sort of like getting one of those tiny fried apple pies from 7-11, only completely opposite.

I shot this just after dusk…

I tried to get into Tiananmen Square in the middle of the big pre-Olympic celebration. The military not only had the whole square shut down, but they also had all the surrounding blocks at a standstill.

A taxi dropped me off where the police told him to drop me off - and my taxi driver did not ask questions. It was impossible for me to get over to the square. All of my cajoling and joking with the Chinese government police was absolutely not working. They neither found me charming nor amusing. It was about as useful as when I was stuck in immigration in Canada and trying to get back across the border using only my Blockbuster card as identification.

This left me in an older part of Beijing for about 5 hours trying to find my way back to my hotel or something I could recognize, since most of the car activity was shut down in the central part of the city. I went through a ton of back streets and captured many interesting things with my camera. I’ll post them in coming weeks!

The green valleys of remote China on a summer day…

The immensity of the Great Wall is something that has to be seen to be believed. I don’t know if this shot can do it justice, but if you zoom in, you can see how this goes off into the infinite mountains of China.