I'm going to start a #sketchymemories contest in honor of trying to get this post to reach me over 60 rep (I'm around 59.8). Head to the bottom for info

In December 2007 I took a trip to China's Great Wall.

I found some photos of my trip to the capital of modern-day China, Beijing.
I went there in December of 2007, around 8 months before they hosted the Olympics. I suppose I was reminded of this for a few reasons.

So first why is this #sketchymemories?

1. Some people in America want to build a great wall
2. In Korea these days it is very polluted and I mostly remember my trip to Beijing as the first time I experienced extreme air pollution.
3. I was recently loading pictures onto my back up hard drive so I usually browse while it is plugged in
4. China is in the news a lot and it was the only time I went there asides from several trips to Hong Kong and Macau.
5. There are some other sketchy parts from that trip, but I'll talk about them later maybe, lol.

So let's begin

Around 600 years ago, some people in China got together and decided they were upset with Mongolians illegally entering their country so they decided to build a wall.

They built their wall along the northern border and near a place which was the Ming royal capital called Peking. From what I know, the Mings hated foreigners and decided to look internally. Their Buddist and Confucian architecture reminds me of Joseon Korea which happened at a similar time.

Instead of making the Mongolians pay for it, they decided to use peasant labor and whips. Blood sweat and tears got the job done through some of the toughest terrain imaginable.

Unlike the medieval Chinese laborers, I didn't actually walk up that hill. I took a modern day chair lift. I guess the rich people back then rode up to the top on a sedan chair carried by servants.

I remember taking a slide down. It was fun and fast, but I couldn't take a picture because it would be dangerous.
I did take a picture of a funny guy who charged me around $5 for the privilege. He looks better in the wall's tower without a bunch of tourists standing around so I moved him in there.

I don't remember the place I went exactly, but it was the 2nd closest spot to the city. The closest spot is way too crowded. My Chinese friend helped me hire a taxi to take me there so I wasn't stuck on a tourist bus. The taxi driver rear-ended someone on a highway off-ramp and I remember spending a couple of hours at a repair shop.

You can kind of see the chair lift's top station in the background. It was smog, not fog, but they called it fog and I believe it was also a 'blue sky day'. Hopefully, it gives you an idea of how few people were in that part of the great wall, also how far I walked. I think I went around 2 kilometers and hardly saw anyone.

The towers were quite impressive and strong. I can imagine soldiers used to live in these places. Most of them were big enough for a few people. Even if you climbed over the wall, attacking the castles would have been difficult, so sneaking into China would have been tough because they would have lit a signal fire or something to alert nearby armies and large forts.

It would have probably not been very fun up there guarding the wall against an enemy that only attacked every few years or so. But at least the view was nice. This is one of my favorite pictures.

Maybe one day I will go back to this wall. I have other pictures from Beijing that I can perhaps share on another #sketchymemories.

If you don't know what #sketchymemories is, this is when we are encouraged to look through old photographs, old journals or even old Internet bookmarks and share poorly remember or half-forgotten memories. The kinds of stories you aren't even sure happened work, too. I encourage rambling.

#sketchymemories rules are simple:

• use the hashtag in your post and preferably in a tag
• You had to be alive
• Anything over a decade old is far back enough to count, nothing more recent though
• You need to remember the approximate time give or take 6 months
• If you don't have photos that you took, any photos used should be sourced and the story should make up for it
• I don't want you to just post a song you can add one, but it better be before the 1960s
• I prefer you to write a story about a touching memory, event or trip that was triggered by something more recent
• I don't want to actually see anything really sketchy like NSFW sketchy, but a weird story, even embellished a little would be perfect

Contests

To celebrate my first #sketchymemeories, I will give 1 share of #steembasicincome to 3 people who use this tag in their post in a manner which I find most satisfying and then post a link here before 7 days is up. It is not first come first serve, I'll pay it when the post is at least 3 days old to give you a chance

I am also going to set a bounty of 5 Steem (if I can figure it out), to get that you can comment with a link to a new post or an old post that is yours and relevant, you should also describe it breifly

###GLHF and let's see if this can help me push 60 rep.
Disclaimer I want to get more bonuses with airdrops from all the SMTs.