Beijing is a very interesting place, to say the least. The travel day to get here was very intense; we started at 4 AM in Pittsburgh and after two flights, a three hour layover in Newark, and fourteen combined hours in the air, we landed in Beijing. After our first dinner, we got well rested and prepared for our first, full day.

The first day was the part of the trip that I was looking forward to the most. The Great Wall of China is something I have wanted to visit my entire life. We started the day early at 8 AM and got on the road to go to the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, which is the most popular section of the Great Wall for tourists. On the trip there, I looked out the window at our surroundings and I noticed that the level of infrastructure in this country is complex and it is constantly evolving. There were so many bridges and different ways to leave the city. In addition, on the highway I noticed a big bridge being built and it seemed as if this bridge went on forever. But I soon learned that this was not an automobile bridge. For the 2022 Winter Olympics, the country wants to make travel between cities faster since events will be spaced out around the region. Turns out they are making a bullet train and the bridge is the rail that connects Beijing to a neighboring city! The normal travel time would be three hours to get from Beijing to the neighboring city but with this new bullet train, it will only take an hour.

When we arrived, we took a shuttle to the entrance and we had to decide whether or not to take the chairlift or the stairs. As a group, we decided to take the stairs up to the wall and we severely underestimated how many stairs there were; they were ridiculously steep and it felt like it took forever to reach the top. After three bottles of water, we reached the top and it was worth the exhausting hike. The view from the top of the mountain was amazing and the hilly landscape made it easy to observe the wall from different angles. The wall looked as massive as I predicted it to be.

While walking along the wall, we met students from West Virginia University which made me realize we live in very small world! After we took our pictures on the wall, we took the Toboggan down which was a fun way to celebrate our long hike up the mountain.

After our visit to the Great Wall, we went straight to lunch for an authentic Chinese style meal. The food had many new, different tastes that has made me more open to trying new things, atypical of my rather picky eating habits. The adventurous part of eating meals here is we are not really told what we are eating until after we have eaten it.

Lastly, after lunch we went to the Summer Palace where we listened to the cultural history of the site and learned a lot about ancient China. There were a lot of cool structures and the architecture was very representative of old China. The most intriguing part of this visit was not the actual place, but the amount of attention we got as a group. We were treated like celebrities; other Chinese people were taking pictures of us from afar and a few brave souls approached us for pictures. If they were not taking pictures, they were staring at us which was new. Some were listening in on our tour, joining the tour like they were one of us and standing very close to all of us. It was interesting to see the amount of attention we received just because we looked different, something we would not see at home.