Go Ahead, Ring the Bell

My kids and I visited China in 2008 on what they jokingly called the "Sweatshops and Pagodas" tour. (More about that later.) (Maybe.) But in Hangzhou they changed the name to the "No, Not Another Garden" tour. To be fair, we did see a lot of gardens. So they were ready for something different, and when we discovered we could climb this tower, we decided to go for it. Naturally, there were the usual warning signs, making us wonder if there had been an unusual number of people throwing cuticle clippers from the tower recently... 

There was a charge to climb, so most of the group declared it a ripoff and went elsewhere--probably to see more of the gardens--but we paid and climbed. And climbed. And climbed. It actually wasn't very challenging, except that the stairs were a remarkable number of different heights and widths, all too narrow for our big American feet.  Oh, and it was dark.  

The beautifully carved archways were only about 4 or 5 inches too low for my younger son to pass through, so there was a fair amount of bobbing, weaving and head-bonking while walking sideways in the dark. And none of us could ever explain the mysterious white powder that somehow got all over me, but nobody else. It was great!

When we got to the bottom, we were invited to ring the enormous bell. Of course, there was an additional charge for this. The boys concluded that, having come all the way to China and climbing the tower, it only made sense to ring the bell. Seemed logical to me. We paid, we rang, we laughed.

Sure, you don't want to be the hapless tourist who falls for every crazy scheme to separate you from your money, but you know what? It was fun at the time, and made a happy memory for later.  Prudent or not, sometimes ya just gotta ring the bell.

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