THE REALLY BIG WALL OF CHINA
No trip to China would have been complete without paying a visit to some portion of the Great Wall. Above is a picture from the section of the Great Wall in Ba Da Ling, about 40 kilometers north of Beijing. It was a bit cloudy and rainy the day we were there, but it was definitely still worth visiting.
Throughout the centuries there have actually been many walls in China all built to keep someone from invading someone else's space. "The Great Wall" is the combination of many of the walls that came before it and whose construction began in 221 BC. Below is a bad picture of a map of China full of walls.
After you have been in China for a while you start to notice that virtually everything has a wall around it. The notion of a wall appears to permeate the culture. Sometimes you thought it's was just to keep animals in or out of an area, but then you started to wonder why they had to be two, three and four meters high? Maybe it was because there were a lot of climbing, high jumping goats. 
Some of the great walls that were built were as elaborate as the section of The Great Wall in Ba Da Ling with such items as watch towers, a signal communication system, and hidden passages leading from the top of the wall to the ground for the transport of supplies and troops. Other walls were nothing more than a ditch with the removed dirt piled up to form a wall.
Below is a picture of the non-restored portion of the wall at Ba Da Ling as it stretched off into the mountains.
One of the neat attractions at the museum was The Circle Theater. It was a large circular room with 19 curved movie screens that went all of the way around the room. A projector between two screens would project one section of the 360-degree scene onto the screen on the opposite side of the room. Viewers just had to stand in the middle of the room with the movie going on all around them. It was impressive.
The area around the Ba Da Ling gate and the place where you went up to the top of the wall was stuffed with little shops.
