This afternoon, I gave a talk on “The Emergence of Service Science” to the “Introduction to E-Services” class at Peking University. The talk went well, I think — their English was far better than my Mandarin. I spent the morning with the professor’s grad student (who is also a full-time IBMer at the China Software Development Lab) — he played tour guide for me and took me to Dashilar (shopping, though I didn’t buy anything, and my first sight of Beijing’s hutongs), Tienanmen Square (where I snagged my first Chinese geocache), and the Forbidden City (where I snagged my second Chinese geocache).

I took a lot of pictures, which I’ll edit and post some time when I’m more awake (hmmm, I think I said that yesterday, too). I would have had even more, but I forgot to charge my camera after yesterday’s all-day expedition, and my battery died soon after entering the Forbidden City. But I had a plan B — my cellphone camera; unfortunately, the lens is dirty and the pictures didn’t come out well, hence the shot of the sign above (which I took with the cellphone — it was the best shot I took with it, too).

Dinner tonight was interesting; two of my colleagues and I went to Ding Dine Xiang, a Mongolian hotpot place. Mongolian hotpot is almost exactly the same as shabu shabu, so it wasn’t as exotic as we had expected when we picked the place. Ordering, on the other hand, was a bit of an adventure, because the place didn’t have an English menu. Our waitress was able to tell us that they had lamb and beef (which was fine with us), but that was as much as we were able to communicate — but then she called the manager and he spoke enough English for us to know what we were getting. I think the waitress was much more flustered by the inability to communicate than we were. And the food was excellent (especially when dipped in sesame sauce). I’d happily go back on a future trip to Beijing.

Mao Tse-Tung said “A man, who has not been to the Great Wall, is not a real man.” I’m not sure I would agree completely with that sentiment, but a trip to the Great Wall is well worth the effort (and yes, that does include the trip to Beijing!).

We left the hotel this morning at the civilized hour of 8am, planning to visit the Great Wall and the Summer Palace. Traffic was, as usual, horrid, but after a while, we left the worst of it and found ourselves on the way to Badaling, which would be our portal to the Wall.

About an hour from Beijing, we started to climb the mountains and got our first view of the Wall:

There were steep sections visible, too:

(though obviously not too steep for tourists!)

And twenty minutes later, our bus pulled into the parking lot at Badaling. We resisted temptation

and headed for the cable car, which would take us to the Great Wall itself. The view from the cable car wasn’t bad:

but it paled compared to the view from the Wall itself:

One advantage of travelling with friends is that I can be in the picture instead of just behind the camera:

I had hoped to go hit a geocache while on the wall — its site is in the distant tower in this photo:

but we only had 75 minutes on the Wall, and that would not have been long enough. As it was, my friends and I were the last ones down from the Wall (our host was getting worried, I think!).

The Wall was only the start of the day’s activities, but the rest of the story will have to wait for another time; it’s time for bed here in Beijing.