Standing on a piece of history

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We woke up early to headed to the Great Wall. There are four different places you can visit the wall relatively close to Beijing, with the closer one’s being more touristy. We opted for Simitai, a section that was supposed to be a little less crowded and allow for a better experience. We hired a driver for the day (500 yuan - about $60) and set off.

The wall was amazing and surrounded by beautiful scenery. You could hike up different sections of the wall and go into each of the watchtowers. It was definitely one of those surreal moments that you don’t often get in the US with our country being so young. It was crazy to think about how it was built over 500 years ago, stone by stone.

As we walked up the wall these three Chinese people joined us. At first we thought they were just being friendly, but then it seemed liked they just wouldn’t go away. Turns out they stay with you to “help” you get up the wall…and then at the end they ask you to pay them. So despite our insistence that we were fine, they stuck around for a while.

Being so high up it was super windy and that made walking a bit treacherous. Needless to say, the combination of Bithiah’s lack of grace and the high winds ended up with her taking quite a spill face forward down the incline of the wall. (Maybe we should have accepted those people’s offer of help after all…). Luckily, she only ended up with some cuts and bruises and the only real damage was to her pride, so we continued our way down. We had planned on taking a cable car ride down but due to the high winds they weren’t running. Facing a climb back up to walk the wall back down, we chose an off roads path and eventually made it too the bottom.

That night we met Orion’s friend Guilliam. He was a really cool guy from Benin (small country in west Africa) who has lived in China for several years. We met him out for dumplings (yummy!) and had our first taste of Chinese liquor, baijo (not so yummy!). After dinner we headed to this club Zub, for Afro-Soul night. We learned that “going out” isn’t really a Chinese thing -they’re more into big, long dinners and karaoke. There were lots of Westerners at the bar and Bithiah was stoked there was a Western toilet. Pretty interesting experience being in a random bar in China listening to reggae!

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