Beijing!!!

(Caitlin)

I’m going to start off with how absolutely bizarre it is that this is my very last blog post in China. Two months is a long time, and it’s been fantastic. All right, on to Beijing.

We arrived on our train at around seven-thirty AM, where our new tour guide, Hans, met us. He told us that he got his English name directly from his family name, Han, so his business card actually reads “Hans Han”. We went straight to our hotel for check-in, and a quick shower and change of clothes. I’m beyond glad we stopped first, because after that we hit the ground running.

One of my favorite things that we’ve seen in Beijing was the Great Wall. Such a cliché touristy thing, I know, but it was so cool! The section of the wall that we went to see was a quieter section than most, because this particular area had no public transportation to get to it, so you would have to get a cab or a rental car or drive yourself to get there. For us, this basically meant that there were no huge tour group buses spilling thirty odd people out every five seconds. I was still surprised by how quiet it was when we arrived, there really weren’t any other people around, and we hadn’t arrived that early in the day, either. We took a minute to grab our tickets for the chairlift up and alpine slide down (more on that later), and then headed up. The particular section of the Great Wall that we were visiting was way up on the top of a mountain (a small one, but still a five-minute chairlift ride up), and when we go to the top we started to climb. The Great Wall is pretty much all stairs, some super steep, some more like an incline, but oh so many stairs. We stopped every once and a while for some pictures (a nice vendor lady took a few pictures of the whole group for us at the top of one particular incline) and just to look.

Inside the towers that are placed intermittently along the wall was pretty awesome, too. They were cooler inside than it was outside, so we stopped for a while in each of them, and the insides were covered in people’s names, all scratched out in dozens of languages with pieces of rock that had crumbled off of other parts of the wall (it looked like white chalk, but it was parts of the wall). After about two hours we decided to head on down, to the alpine slide.

A few of us had taken alpine slides before, but never from the top of the Great Wall of China, something I don’t think any of us ever expected to do. It was a pretty long track, mostly metal, and if you wanted, you could go wicked fast down it, especially on the curves, which was, naturally, what we all did.

That’s the end of my very last blog post here in China. We’re getting on the plane in a few hours, so I’ll see everyone soon! It’s been a truly incredible couple of months, and it feels strange to go, but I think we’re all tired, and ready to go home.