When I was a kid growing up in an Olney rowhouse, the Great Wall was just a Chinese restaurant on Roosevelt Boulevard near Adams Avenue. I suppose I'd seen pictures of the real wall but I had no illusions about ever getting there. Who went to China in those days, in that big, big 1950s' world? Who went anywhere besides the Jersey Shore? I suppose I was capable of dreaming about someday getting to England or France or even Germany, where my father and most of the fathers on Albanus Street  had fought only a few years earlier. But China? The Great Wall? Never even appeared as a blip on my imagination's radar screen.

So it was somewhat astounding on Monday to find myself standing atop the monumental structure, just above the village of Mutianyu. The wall's scope is breathtaking. Even on the furthest mountain in the distance, you could see it relentlessly snaking along the summit, It falls and rises with the slope of the hills, a challenge for the tourists who travel it like a boardwalk. In some places, to continue walking, you'd have to climb sections that appear to rise as high as a 40- or 50-story building. Fortunately, that section was closed for repairs - and probably to sweep away the carcasses of overweight Americans who tried and failed.

The notion that this colossal engineering feat  was built several centuries ago is astounding. How did they get the stone and brick up the steep mountainsides? Where did the workers rest? Eat? How many died? How many escaped? How many invading armies has it repelled over the centuries?

We walked for a few miles with our mouths agape. My two companions bought cans of beer from a curmudgeonly, crouching vendor positioned beneath a red umbrella. They they photographed themselves drinking it. We couldn't take enough photos.

Then, after the cable-car ride back down to Mutianyu, we could have used a Great Wall-like barrier ourselves. The long walkway between the cable-car dropoff point and the parking lot where we were headed was lined with a colorful gauntlet of souvenir peddlers. It made the Wildwood boardwalk look like the Champs d'Elysee. The vendors were, politely, insane. They stuffed T-shirts and boxed chopsticks into your face. "You like? One dollar? One dollar? Low price?" When you attempted to reject their impassioned entreaties, they backpedaled along in front of you, shouting all the way. "What you pay? Tell me? Low price." You'd avoided one and ricocheted into another, equally aggressive, equally annoying, equally incapable of taking no for an answer.

If they'd been selling something besides Chinese junk - not the boats - it might have been interesting. But all they had were the kind of cheap trinkets you get when you cash in your ski-ball tickets in an arcade. Anyway, multiply that scene by 30 or 40 and you'll have some idea about the scale of its unpleasantness. The Chinese people were not mean-spirited. In fact, they seemed to enjoy the frantic pitching and bargaining, even if many of the tourists did not. It's just a shame that all that venality had to be set in such stark juxtaposition.

The world is different than it was in the 1950s. It's tough for us Boomers to surf along in all this change's roiling wake. I suppose the kids growing up on Albanus Street these days dream bigger than we did. I hope theirs come true too.