I slept really well last night. Having not slept for almost two days really takes it out of you. Today, we saw the Great Wall. It took us about an hour and half by bus to get to the Wall. Once we were there, we had the option of hiking up the stairs or taking this ski lift type thing up to the top. Being adventurous, we all decided to hike the stairs. I don’t think we fully comprehended just how many stairs we would have to climb. No one factored in the temperature either. The temperature was probably pushing 90 degrees. By the time we reached the top we were all exhausted, but the view was spectacular. There are mountains on either side of you, and the wall itself stretches out over the mountainside.

It was the strangest feeling being on the top of the Great Wall. In the United States, the oldest things we have date back only 200 years, but the Wall is ten times that. It’s weird to think that something so old can still be standing. Being on the Wall and looking on either side of you to see it stretch out, it almost looks fake, like it isn’t really there. I never thought I would actually see it in person, yet there I was touching a part of history. For a half an hour we walked along a section of the wall. For as much struggle as we went through to get up to the top, going down the wall was much easier and a whole lot more exciting. We tobogganed down the Great Wall. It was amazing. How many people can say they have been to the Great Wall, let alone toboggan down the slope?

For dinner, a few of us went to a hot pot restaurant, which is where you order a couple different soups and then order what you want to add to the soup, such as vegetables or meats. You sit at this table where the soup basically cooks in front of you and after it heats up you add in the meats or vegetables to the soups that you want. You don’t actually eat the soup. You take out the add ins and eat those. It was definitely an experience because the waitress did not speak English and none of us spoke Mandarin so there was a good bit of miming and pointing to get ideas across. Everyone involved was super confused, and the waitress would laugh at us as we tried to figure things out. Also, at this restaurant they gave us hot towels to wipe our faces with, cloths to clean your glasses, and then the waitress gave me a hair tie so that I could pull my hair back. My hair isn’t even shoulder length so I’m not sure why I got one, but nonetheless I used it anyway. Although ordering was a challenge, we eventually got food. And of course, we ate that food with chopsticks.