Beijing pt.II

With the fog blown clear, visibility our second day on the Wall was vastly improved. We started early, hiking forty minutes up a mountainside to reach a precariously positioned watchtower, offering views of the surrounding valleys, snaked with rivers, and the Wall itself, stretching out behind us like a huge stone serpent, shedding its ancient scales. From old to new, distant past to polished present, the wall transformed beneath our feet. Though we'd started alone, by the time we finished, the Wall was populated by hordes of tourists. People lined up to ride a cable car that carried them all of 200 meters to a designated lookout point--no one ventured further. Walking down, I saw something written, in huge Chinese characters, on the side of a mountain. Thinking it might be a dedication to a legendary general who was wrongly executed by a misinformed Emperor, I asked Chenney what it said, but he only replied, flatly, "We love Chairman Mao."
That evening, we checked into a hostel run by a pair of outrageously cute Chinese girls, whose friendliness bordered on flirtation. Giggling after everything she said, one girl showed us to our room, a room that Hyangmi soon deemed intolerable, insisting we leave after only one night.

On our final full day in China we went to the Forbidden City, which, in all honesty, was pretty disappointing. Like many famous places in China, the Forbidden City suffered from rampant touristification. Too many people and too much modern stuff crammed into an otherwise beautiful architectural space. Vendors, hawkers, gift shops, tour guides, trash cans, plasma screen TV's, electric golf carts. All these things only served to detract from the beauty of the site, and remove one completely from the feeling that they were walking through a Ming Dynasty building complex. I'm no expert in tourism, but, would it kill anyone to have some actors (or the staff) dress in traditional Chinese clothing and walk around the place? And wouldn't rickshaws be more appropriate for trucking lazy tourists around in than electric golf carts? Certainly, limiting the number of people who may enter on any given day, or at any given time, has never crossed the governments mind.

We walked through Tiananmen Square on our way back to our new hostel, which was, unsurprisingly, just a really big square. It did, however, have the widest television screen I'd ever seen in it. Two of 'em. Chinese police officers were scattered generously around the square, (actually, you have to pass through another one of those dreaded security check points just to enter it).
After spending nearly a month in China, I'd seen a lot of police officers. They were everywhere. But even after all that time, I still couldn't figure out what it was they did. It seemed to me they just stood, watching over things. Things like statues, fountains, and roads. If anybody stepped out of line, tried to take a photo too close to a fountain, or walked somewhere they shouldn't, the police were quick to blow a whistle and tell them not to do so, and that was it. The police are ever-present in China, standing at attention in perfectly pressed uniforms, ensuring nobody walks on the grass.