In the morning we drove northwest of Beijing to see the Great Wall at Ba Da Ling. It seems that only Gao Huiying, Kashif Nadeam Chaudhary and I made the long and winding trek up to wall toward the fortified tower. We had great fun talking about the wall and the difficulty of the walk. Then we took pictures including a video effort by me. We found the walk tiring but exciting. I told Kashif about my early reading about the history of the wall and reasons for the way it was built including the double wall system, so that defenders could still hold the line even if they lost the main wall. We also discussed the smoke signals used to call for help depending on the numbers of attackers.

I mentioned to the group that, of course, it was one thing to read about the walk and quite another to actually be there and see it.

Talking with Chinese astronomy-lovers

From we came back in town and Gao Huiying took me to the Beijing Planetarium to me with the astronomers I had been asked to talk with about promoting solar system, asteroid work in China. They took us on a tour of the planetarium which is very new, once it closed, then others astronomers began to shot up and I began to do my talk about asteroids. I also gave a number of gifts of videos, CDs and DVDs about astronomy.

They took us out for dinners and then we returned to the hotel to prepare for the Forbidden City tomorrow and our trip to Xi'an tomorrow night by train.

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