Two walls to talk about today.

First, the Great Wall of China. I went with Beida (Peking University) to the Great Wall. Besides being an unusually gorgeous day, the national military academy was marching thousands of soldiers across the section we were on. At one point I was stuck inside one of the stone turrets, unable to get out as thousands of Chinese Soldiers passed through. My gut feeling was to not push the Chinese soldiers (carrying the Chinese flag) out of the way.

I overheard one soldier saying (in perfect English) to his friend, "We cannot speak English now, we are Chinese Soldiers!"

Here are my pictures from The Great Wall. 

A few interesting facts about the Great Wall are in order.

Our tour guide said the Great Wall was named as such for two reasons:

1. It is Great.
2. It is a wall.

I can offer a less penetrating analysis but hopefully one still worth reading:

1. The Wall was started by the Qin dynasty and "refurbished" by many others, especially the Ming Dynasty. This means most sections of the wall are more than 2000 years old.
2. The Wall is not continuous. There are many separate pieces and they often enclose the same area. All of the pieces combined are about 5,500 miles long.
3. The Wall's main purpose was to protect China from northern invaders.
4. Contrary to popular myth, you cannot see it with the naked eye from space. Sure, you can see it from the moon with high-powered telescopes, but that isn't the point. We can see other galaxies with high-powered telescopes.
5. The least-known and most-important fact about the Great Wall of China today is that at certain points, tourism companies have built questionably "safe" single-person slides to go back down the mountain as fast as you'd like. Witness my experience in the following video:

The Great Slide of China from Daniel Nalesnik on Vimeo.

To read more about the Great Wall of China, I recommend the Wikipedia Article.

The second wall to talk about is the Great Firewall. Last week I was unable to access Kinselan.com directly and had Ben Orenstein help me set up a way to email my posts directly to the server, which in turn would post to my blog. I did this because the Chinese government blocks access to a wide number of internet sites, to the chagrin of anyone used to unrestrained access. Although kinselan.com would not normally be blocked, it is hosted by popular blogging software; blogs are often censored because people might be saying something negative about the perfect middle Kingdom.

Enter VPNs. A virtual private network allows me to connect to another computer and send encrypted data, which in turn decrypts the data and has some distant computer carry out my internet requests (like access a wikipedia article on the Tiananmen Square Protests), and send them back to me encrypted. I used http://www.witopia.net. $60 USD for a year of use. 

Now, I can access kinselan.com and make sure my posts look pretty. I noticed a few previous posts with badly malformed sentences - none of which were my fault. Additionally I could now upload higher resolution images, but my internet speed is ATROCIOUS (not due to the VPN). For those of you who have used speedtest.net, here is my computer's score:

If this image means nothing to you, know that my speed is roughly equivalent to dialup in 1996.

I've started playing Go (ancient asian board game) with my roommate. I also noticed that many stores sell it - and there is a place to play at a local mall. I will challenge a local Chinese to a game in the next few weeks. Wish me luck.

Yesterday I found a market selling live scorpions on a stick. Four per stick, skewered through the stomach (but still alive and squirming). Everyone was shocked at how foul this was. An American traveler finally ate one. Watch the video here:

Yummy Scorpions from Daniel Nalesnik on Vimeo.

I purchased a bicycle! Now I am a true Beijinger. No one wears helmets and everyone drives fast in traffic. I don't know what to say. I am trying to be safe. 

I ran out of white socks, so I purchased ten pair for 20 kuai, about $3 USD. They have both Nike and Adidas logos on them. Must be legit ;)

This morning was the Beida placement exam. It was about two hours long. I hope I am placed in a level above the true beginners - but the test was hard! I'll find out my results tomorrow. Either way, I can't wait to start!