The Great Wall of Cats

Today we headed out to the Great Wall. It’s a Beijing essential so we had to make sure to check it off the list. I’m sure seeing the Great Wall isn’t insanely appealing to someone who has lived in Beijing their whole life, so I appreciated that Buboli was willing to take the time to show it to me. I’m normally more interested in learning about how people live their modern lives than visiting monuments and structures, but I’m glad we saw the Great Wall. Its massive size and height really is something that is hard to understand without seeing it in person. I remember reading about how long the wall was in middle school and thinking that it was one of those wonders that are hard to even imagine. It’s supposedly 13,171 miles and would take 500+ days to hike down it. America is 2,800 miles wide, so this wall could stretch over it multiple times. It’s insane that China has this wall built before the industrial revolution and America still doesn’t even have accessible high speed rail in modern times. I think that if I learned about this wall before the internet was around then I wouldn’t believe any of the literature talking about how long it is. Not only is the wall long, but it has a height that would be impossible to scale without some insane tools and the wall itself is positioned on the highest peaks of the mountains. We walked across the wall for an hour or two and it’s hard to imagine that I could continue walking for days and still find more wall.

We saw a good number of cats along the wall as well. These cats were not overly friendly, but also did not shy away from people. This behavior made them give off a sort of majestic vibe because they had their chests poofed out and didn’t flinch at all as you walked by or approached them. Buboli mentioned that because of the cold weather, they stayed still to preserve warmth. I can’t say that I’ve seen cats behave exactly this same way anywhere else so it was interesting to see. It was great seeing the holes in the wall originally designed for surveillance, archery, and firing weapons being used as official cat perches. There were even parts of the wall where you could see five or more consecutive holes being manned by a cute cat.

The weather was oddly pleasant for being winter and there was an extremely low number of people. Buboli said that he has never seen the wall with this few people and that there are times where you might find yourself shoulder to shoulder with others. I’m glad that this made the pictures come out more like tour guide photos and let Buboli and I have some more close conversations about life that the more quiet atmosphere lends to. This also lends to us being able to take a ton of fursuit photos so that was a great way to some once-in-a-lifetime shots.

One of the highlights was taking the Great Slide of China down from the wall. There was a big metal slide that you can ride down on these sled-like things. I ended up getting stuck behind a woman who was going about at a speed slower than walking the entire way down. There were about ten of us backed up behind her, just crawling along at her speed. It took a lot of energy to keep stopping and starting again since all of our inertia was taken away from having to stop. I honestly probably would have yelled at her if I were more confident that should could understand me 😆 She kept pulling up her purse onto her shoulder as if she was having trouble keeping it on her, but she might as well have been sitting on a stationary sled. I was so visibly annoyed that the action shot photo they took of me on the way down captured a sort of annoyed scowl. After walking out of the slide area, I thought it was a funny memory and actually wanted to buy the photo because it was so ridiculous. However, when I went back to ask for it, the staff told me it had already been deleted. I honestly don’t think they actually deleted it that quickly; I suspect they just didn't want to deal with someone coming back into the slide area to look for a photo. I guess I’ll have to come back one day to experience the slide at full speed.Read more