On our third day in Beijing, we started out the day by visiting the Beijing Olympic Stadium and the Water Cube. Here’s the obligatory family snapshots out of the way first.

The “Birds Nest” looks even more impressive up close.

Our guide Laura told us that there are upmarket restaurants in there, and you can hire parts of the stadium or all of it for functions and conventions. My first thought was: this would be an awesome place for a rave. Hahah!

In contrast, the Water Cube looks pretty ordinary in daylight.

But as we’ve seen on TV, it does look amazing at night with all the pretty lights. It’s now become a water park.

As the whole area was purpose built for the Beijing Olympics, there is a lot of space everywhere you look.

But at the same time, it can make the place look devoid of life.

On our way out, we come upon this fantastic looking building. It’s The Digital Building – it provided IT, computing and communication services during the 2008 Olympics. I don’t know what it’s being used for these days but it’d sure be a waste if it’s not utilised anymore.

I love the night life and I love the pretty lights. And because I know that I wouldn’t be able to stop taking pictures, I no longer take my camera to these things anymore. So you will have to make do with these photos that were taken with the crappy camera on the iPhone 3G.

These don’t do justice to the event on Friday night at Metro City, which was bloody awesome.

After visiting the Great Wall and lunch, we headed back into Beijing City to visit the 798 Art District. The entire area used to be a military factory and parts of it have been intentionally left rusty and decrepit. More info at Wikipedia.

798 Art Zone – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The place is full of galleries and little shops selling anything and everything “arty”: clothes, paintings, photos, prints, metal craft, collectibles like old toys and, retro and art-deco furnishings. It was bloody interesting.

I especially love the interesting shop-fronts everywhere.

It felt like everything and everywhere in the district was a blank canvas …

Besides the galleries (most of which you can’t take photos inside) I couldn’t stop looking at everything.

Even this looks interesting to me.

The sign says “Please don’t turn this switch off”. And someone scribbled on it “Feel free to turn off”.

We bought a few knick-knacks and photos but because we were tired, we only spent about an hour walking around. You can definitely spend a day there if you like what you see above. It’s a cliche but we felt like our souls were enriched that day.

Just a quick mention: I’ve installed an excellent WordPress plugin called WPtouch which optimises this blog for most mobile devices including iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

That means the blog and images now fit the smaller screens and you don’t have to zoom in and out, or scroll sideways and back to view. You just scroll one way: up and down. It’s brilliant. Ok that is all.

On our second day in Beijing, we headed out to see the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China. It’s about an hour outside of Beijing city.

We got to the bottom of the hill at about 9:30. To go up the hill to see the wall, there were two choices: hike or cable car. We took the easier option as hiking the wall was going to be a challenge in itself.

The above photo is to show you how high up we have to go. It really made me wonder: how tenacious were the Mongols and the Huns that they would hike and cross such high mountains to attack and invade China? And how difficult it would have been to cart the bricks up the mountains to build the wall? It’s really mind boggling.

As we got closer, we caught the silhouette of the wall. It got us very excited. As soon as we got up there, we took a family photo to commemorate the occasion.

On the right side of the picture, you can see a very steep section of the wall. At the bottom is a guard tower. That was where we all called it quits and decided to turn back. My dad ventured up that steep section for a little bit, about a half hour or so and then turned back too. Although it was cool, the sun was beating down on us as you can tell from my and Marvin’s expressions.

As the wall follows the contours of the mountains, you might as well have been hiking the actual mountains. The soldiers who’d manned the wall and the towers would need to have been very fit indeed.

So the squarish towers you see dotted along the walls are the guard towers. Here, Marvin is standing in front of an officer tower, which you can tell looks different to the guard towers.

Here’s me in front of a guard tower. I didn’t notice the smiling girl above me when we took the photo.

The inside of the guard towers are mostly bare and our guide told us that 20-30 soldiers would man each tower. Being stuck out here, rain, hail or shine must have been a really bonding experience for the soldiers, though it was possibly very lonely and boring too.

Needless to say, the views were spectacular from every point of the wall. The photo below is another view of where you could have walked up to if you were really fit and keen. At the guard tower where we gave up, I estimate we would have had another 1-2 kilometres to go? Following the steep section of the wall and then to the left of it, you can see where the end point would be, just above the left side of the row of words in the mountain. Apparently, you’d get a certificate if you get that far.

Below is the steep section up close.

Even the not-so steep sections of the wall were not easy to climb. We had to walk in zig-zag fashion.

But man, I think I speak for my whole family when I say that our minds were blown. We spent about 3 hours out there, and a great day was had. Oh, and we were really tired after. Hahah!