First trip to the Great Wall

So I finally decided to setup my own blog. Up to this point I've been blogging on the site of my last employer. I figured it be better to do it here, so I'm going back and posting some of my older posts here.

This first post is from September 06, 2008. It was when the school organized a trip to a super-awesome part of the Great Wall. It was called Qiangzi Lu, and it was breathtaking!

We had to meet at the school at 8am to head off to the Great Wall. Everyone was pretty tired but excited to go. It was about a 2.5 hour drive through the mountains from the school to the wall. It was a nice scenic drive. We passed by some cool mountain villages and then stopped at some tiny restaurant for lunch. I think they had never had so many customers before, as they looked pretty surprised when we came in. One thing I still have to get used to is the lack of cleanliness in restaurants here. They set the meat that they were gonna cook for us right on the ground!

We got back on the bus and drove for another 30 minutes or so before the driver dropped us off at the wall. Jiao yu was our guide for the day, and he explained to us that the part of the wall we were starting at was a part of the original wall built over 2000 years ago. Most of what we climbed on was from the Ming Dynasty however. It was a really cool experience because this is what the Chinese refer to as the "Wild Wall." None of it has been restored. It's just been left alone for hundreds of years.

No one was really prepared for this hike. They never told us that it would have been this wild! Nobody dressed appropriately for it. I wore my Diesel shoes and shorts, Friesht even wore high heels. The middle of the wall was covered with thick brush and lots of big spiders. At some points we had to climb off of the wall and go up a bit and climb back up. All around the wall were mountains and lots of trees. It was so beautiful! We hiked for hours and and stopped at a watch tower way high up on a mountain. The view from up there was stunning!

After resting up top for about 30 minutes we started the hike back down. There was this one part that was insanely steep! It was a staircase at some point, but all the steps had been withered away, so it was pretty much just a slope. I was asked to stay towards the back and help some of the girls get down. As I was making my way down, I lost my footing and slammed my foot into a rock. I ended up braking a toe. The rest of the hike down was pretty tough. We then hiked down into this village where the bus driver picked us up and took us back to Beijing. We ended up getting back to Beijing sometime in the evening, and we all went to this restaurant called the Vineyard to have pizza. It was a great day!