The Great Wall and Peking Duck in Bejing

Ben and I make our way up on along the wall

Here's the nice sunrise inage that we got up so early for. Total fog!

The group at the very beginning of the walk

Archer's slot in the wall

You can see off in the distance where the next towers are along the walk on the wall

Climbing down from the point where we took the shortcut back to town

Way up there is where we would have been

The Great Wall - We walked from Jinshanling to Simatai. A driver picked us up at our hotel at 5 in the morning - we wanted to see the Wall at sunup. Little did we realize that we would only see the sun twice on our walk for a total of about 20 seconds! The driver dropped us off at Jinshanling and waited for us at Simatai. The total walk was to be 9 kilometers (5.6 miles as the crow flies). The fun part was the up and down along those 5.6 miles. The wall is pretty steep and in disrepair at the place where we walked so it was a nice strenuous walk to say the least. As we left the drop off point a local farmer walked up to join us. He became our guide for the day (unofficially) and told us about the shortcut back to town about 2 hours into the walk. We had completed 12 of the 26 towers along the way and the shortcut took at least an additional 2 hours off of the time we would have walked. One other note - we saw exactly no one else the entire way along the wall. Had we gone to the place where the tour buses go we would have had a hard time taking a photo with no one in it! Not a soul with us - pretty sweet.

This was the old neighborhood "hutong" where Li Qun Duck Restaurant was located

Sign on the wall showed the way down the alley to the restaurant

Duck this way!

Chef carving up our ducks in our private dining room - Check out Santa and the ornament on the window!

We made a point of having Peking duck in Beijing. We had gotten back from walking on The Wall and were pretty hungry so we headed out to look for a place that had been written up in the Tribune travel section. Li Qun duck restaurant is in one of the hutongs (old neighborhoods) and was actually pretty close to our hotel. They told us to get into the area of the hutong and ask the locals. So we did. Ben knew where that particular hutong was and once we got there we saw a guy out on a street and he asked us if we wanted duck. Just a block or so up ahead was a building that had paintings of a duck with arrows pointing the way down the alley towards the restaurant. It was in an old courtyard home that had a common eating area and a private space that we got for 30 yuan ($4). When you walked into the restaurant you passed an open oven heated with some big logs with the ducks hanging over the flames. The chef came to the table and carved up the duck (2 of them) and presented it on several platters. They gave us little bowls of cucumber, onion and the plum sauce to add in with the duck on the little rice “pancakes”. We had some broccoli and eggplant dishes as sides. Fantastic! Sarah had never tried duck before and although Connie tells me I had it in Thailand it was a new experience for me as well.