The Great Wall

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From my journal.

December 8th

Today is day 1 of our ONLY vacation for the year. Six days off for the whole year. We have worked every single day for 9 months, that's a lot! We left Cheongju this morning at 4:30am. It was freezing and I guess it ended up snowing all day, so we missed the first big snow of the winter but that is just fine with me! 😊 We got to Incheon at 6:50 for our 9:30 flight so we had plenty of time. We flew to Beijing where we had a 9 hour layover. Luckily, we found out that we WERE allowed to leave the airport without visa's, despite what the internet said. I was so excited because we had really been hoping we could make it the Great Wall. And we did! We found a tourism information center and asked them how we could go and the lady didn't speak very good English and told us we should just try to go the Fobidden City instead. We kept walking and found another information center. The first lady I asked said that yes, we could go with her company and be back in a few hours for our flight. The cost was 800yuan, which is about $120, which is 60 bucks a person! I thought it was a pretty great deal. Within a few minutes, a guy picked us up in his car and drove us the hour and a half from the airport to the Great Wall. It was awesome to be able to see some of China, not just the airport. The weather was beautiful! It was absolutely freezing but hardly any clouds and really sunny. The whole thing worked out perfectly and I'm so glad we did it! Sitting there for 8-9 hours would have been miserable. Yay for adventures!

The Wall was very impressive. We took a cable car up to it and walked around as long as we could without freezing to death. The mountains are beautiful and the wall was big, thick, and packed with people. We're so glad we got to see it!

The guy dropped us back off at the airport as the sun was setting and we had plenty of time to grab dinner and then catch our next flight to Bangkok. The most interesting part of this day was being in 3 different Asian countries in the same day. They are all very different and hearing the English accents in each of them was really interesting to me. The English sounds very different in each country. The pushiness of people started to slow down the further from Korea we got. The smiles started to occur more often. The currency is pretty and colorful everywhere but America it seems.

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Photos

Jake ready to go
leaving Incheon

Pigs in a truck
on the drive to the Wall

First sighting
of the wall

Freezing
if you can't tell!

Sunset
over Beijing airport

Thai food
at the Beijing airport

Comments

[Jeanne]

Yay for pictures!!! And yay for vacations!! And yay for skype; it was wonderful to talk last night!! Thanks for always being so thoughtful and keeping me posted about your lives!! I mailed your Christmas package today; no telling when you will get it!! I love you, Bet!! Say "hi" to Jake for me!!

[Amanda]

Yay for detours!
Awesome little detour! I can't wait to hear all about your time in Thailand! I miss it so much but I know you guys are going to have some great stories :)