7/27/2019 Great Wall, Refreshed

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7/27/2019 Great Wall, Refreshed

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2012/13 winter_ busanhaps.com 33

met a crew of descending Caucasians; at the group’s tail stoodMr. Chen himself, wearing a long-sleeved fleece polo and thekind of loose-fitting striped dress trousers one might findcheap at a Nampo-dong thrift shop. He smiled as the otherforeigners continued their descent, breaking for no longer thanone minute before restarting his mountain climb with us in tow.The entry point of the wall is a decrepit section of the 21,000-ki-

lometer-long, centuries-old behemoth; stones have crumbledinto a heap and been reassembled into de facto stairs onto thewall itself. Chen handed us crisp, bright red farm tree apples

and miniature fresh-picked cherry apples from his knapsack,encouraging us to shout into the valley below, which we did,creating a palpable echo that rattled the otherwise totally quietnature surrounding us.The Chenjiapu section of the Great Wall is overgrown with

weeds and covered in dirt, ravished by hundreds of years ofwind and rain. But the guard towers are still relatively intact. Iimmediately noticed that these structures drew out dreams ofboth the child and adult in me: I wished I were an archaeolo-gist, able to appreciate its ancient beauty, yet it’d be way more

awesome to be 10 years old with a paintball gun. After we’d cl imbed back down to the farm, the older wom-an immediately offered us an unbelievable late lunch: home-grown potato and pork stew, scrambled egg and green on-ion pancakes, tangy tofu-cucumber salad, freshly-grown androasted almonds, Hebei radishes, hard-boiled quail eggs.Chen’s seriously shaggy dog (like, so shaggy he’s got driedshit specks hanging off all the shaggy hair covering his bum)waddled up to us before rejoining Chen’s quietly leering cat,watching us inhale the food and cheap Chinese beer.

Behind all this, literally, stood the Great Wall: an idyllic back-drop, impenetrably vast, forever strong, taunting us with itspicturesqueness just a few kilometers away. It taunted us atthe farm and snaked along the highway, taunting us past theyellow mountain, past the highway interchange, back into Bei-

 jing and beyond, in my mind, where it st ill taunts me today.

Prices, contact info, menus and the rest can be found at Great Wall Fresh’s website, made by one kind expat few years back:www.greatwallfresh.com