The Great Wall of China is truly awesome. What’s really amazing is how it’s everywhere. I mean, you’re taking a bus out to go walk a portion of it, and as you look at the tops of the hills around you, you see it in every location. Every hill is topped with the Wall. You can trace it around and watch it wander up and down. It’s boggling to think of how much work that took.
The walls of the Forbidden City are very tall. SpouseO’s 6’6", and he was dwarfed. These things are like 50 feet tall and 10 feet thick. Impressive.
Tian’anmen Square is gray. It was overcast when we were there, and the stones were gray, and all seemed gloomy. It’s bound in by roads, rather than so much by buildings (like most squares I’ve seen) so it’s very large but rather unsquareish - it just seems kind of like a paved field in between some roads. There are some buildings along its border, but they’re not large and far away so it doesn’t seem much like a square at all.
Some building in Beijing are truly massive. None are hugely tall (maybe 20 stories, max) - they’re not skyscrapers - but they’re enormous. They take up entire city blocks and are incredibly imposing.
Moving on to other parts of the world, Red Square is very pretty (lives up to its name in that respect - the word for “red” in Russian can also mean “beautiful” in addition to referring to the color). Larger than I thought, bounded on each side by some pretty amazing architecture - the Kremlin, GUM, St. Basil’s. The towers on the walls are neat, topped by a star made from ruby. They light them up at night. The only truly ugly thing there is Lenin’s tomb. It’s this squatty, granite building, all angles and modern. Truly doesn’t fit with the rest of the area. Lenin himself is interesting, but anticlimatic. While you know that it’s a preserved person in there, you can’t help but think that he’s just wax. Nice glass coffin, however, with some neato flagpoles inside. When I was there, GUM was the department store in Moscow. But shopping there was entirely different than westerners would be used to. You don’t go into a store and browse - oh no. Instead, each store is set up more like a booth with a counter. From the counter, you look at the wares they display on the walls and such, then you ask the salesperson to retrive what you’d like to inspect further or possibly buy. There wasn’t any “in” to the store - you looked from the counter. I understand things have changed greatly since 1992.
Although perhaps not famous, St. Issac’s cathedral in St. Petersburg is the most beautiful cathedral I’ve ever had the pleasure to be in. It’s georgeous. And it brings home history in a concrete manner - the pillars outside are pockmarked from WWII bullets.
The St. Louis arch, while neat, doesn’t go over anything. I thought it spanned something, and it doesn’t. It’s beside the river instead of over it. That was somewhat of a disappointment.
As was the Eiffel Tower. Again, I thought it spanned something. Which it does, in a way - a parking lot. Was hoping for something more poetic. After you get over that, however, it’s also a really neat structure.
