The Great Wall of China is just that; GREAT!!

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Rich invited us on a strenuous hike along the Great Wall of China but unfortunately we had to turn it down as number one, I am not a hiker and number two, I am injured. Thank goodness we didn’t go because we left the house at 6:30am this morning, and its 8pm and they are still not back! We did go along for the ride and got dropped off at the tourist part of the Great Wall called Mutiyanu. Though the area is heavily restored it is still pretty spectacular to imagine that people had hiked these mountains hundreds of years ago and built this humongous wall by hand to keep out the Mongolian people. We walked the wall for about 3 hours before taking the toboggan slide back to the bottom. From the bottom Rich arranged transport for us to the public bus… it seemed way to easy, but we made it back to Beijing in an hour and a half and dropped off only 2 subway stops away from the house.

Instead of coming ‘home’ we headed to go see the Olympic National Stadium. Tristan really wanted to see the funny looking birds nest building from the 2008 summer Olympics. When we got off the subway and onto the street we were a little lost and a lovely Chinese lady who spoke absolutely no english helped us get to where we wanted to go. She was probably with us for a good 10-15 minutes when we finally spotted the building. After taking some photos we came back to the house to discover that Rich was still not back… and Yannie went out to a birthday. Tris and I are figuring out future plans for the next few days!

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