Great Wall Trips

For the first couple of weeks in China, it was impossible for me to sleep longer than 7 in the morning.  First of all, the beds were super hard and so that made things very difficult to sleep. Second of all, the room that I am staying in has a massive window.  It covers pretty much the entire side wall.  Our room is huge but there are some small things that are rather annoying with it.

1.      The window is huge, providing a nice view of the street outside, but it lets in so much light that it wakes us up before our alarms and sleeping through it is pretty difficult.  Also, it allows quite a bit of noise in which used to be a problem for me to get to sleep.

2.      Since our window is so large, both our A/C and our Heat do not work very affectively.  Heat and A/C were lost to the small cracks.  For a while it was getting super cold at night because the Chinese government decides when Heat and A/C is used. 

3.      Our room does not have Wireless internet, which gets pretty annoying.  We have to use hardwires, which was not too bad at first, but now the cord does not want to stay in my laptop and I have to tape it to my computer.

4.      Every once in a while or room reeks of smoke or putrid disgust for a few minutes. It comes in through the bathroom since our bathrooms are pretty much connected to the persons next to us and he smokes and cooks nasty things over there.

 That morning we got on a tour bus and made the 2 hour trip to the Mutianyu portion of the Great Wall (I have now been to this part twice, once with the BYUI group and once with our school). 

 The Great Wall is a pretty impressive sight.  Mao ZeDeng said that if you are a good Chinese person you will make a trip to see the Great Wall.  Well now we are good Chinese people.  It took about 15 minutes to walk up to the wall from the ticket booth.  I decided to walk up to it rather than take the cable car, because let us be honest, what is more impressive to say, “I rode a cable car to the Great Wall of China” or “I climbed the mountain to the Great Wall of China”.  Yeah, the second was does sound much more impressive. The Wall is absolutely massive.  Not tall, but long.  It is only about 20-30 feet tall, enough to keep people from climbing it (though there were plenty of spots where you could get into the wall by the climbing stairs), but is literally thousands of miles long.  The section that we went to had tons of stairs and it took me about 2 hours to get from one side of it to the other.  By the time I reached tower 1 from tower 8 my legs were ready to be done climbing.  At the Tower 1 there are 2 ways that you *can* go.  I emphasize this because one way the government has posted a sign saying “NO ADMITANCE” and the other you have to climb up through a window to get to.  Of course I did both.  The one through the window was not very far before you could not go any further.  The path was only about 3 feet wide as opposed to the 10-15 foot wide path that the rest of the wall was.  Past the sign was the wild portion of the wall.  By wild I mean that the government does not keep up this part of the wall, so many parts of the wild wall are overgrown with plants.  After walking through what was 15 minutes of overgrowth I came to the next tower.  This tower had been destroyed from years being beaten on by the elements.  It was by far the coolest part of the wall for sure.

With time running short I decided to go back.  I ran into Seth and Meredith and chatted with them for a while until Adam, Josh, Abby, and Brett came by and I joined their group.  I took some pictures for them and off we went to the Alpine slide.  The Alpine slide was so much fun.  We were on these little plastic and rubber sleds that had breaks to adjust how fast we went.  First was Josh, second Adam, third Brett, fourth me, and taking up the rear was Abby.  Since the slide is so long they allowed multiple people on it at certain intervals.  If every goes at quick pace you zoom down and you can actually get some air at certain parts.  Since Josh was stuck behind a slow person we stopped multiple times to allow some room between us and the person in front of us.  A few times we crashed into each other, one of those times, Adam broke his camera and watch in Josh’s bag (which later Josh gave Adam his camera to use since he used his phone anyway).  Afterwards we travelled back to the school and relaxed.

The second time I went to this portion of the wall was in October with the school.  Most of the people from our group went to a different part of the wall with the church but since I thought it was too expensive I didn’t end up going with them.  The school offered this trip for free so I decided to go again with my classmates.  I have gotten pretty close to our classmates for various reasons, but the Italian guy in the class and I have a pretty good friendship since I helped him out in a time of need (will talk about that later).  We spent most of the time talking to each other on the way.  When we got to the wall we walked up again. This wasn’t as fast as it was last time since we decided to go to tower 10 rather than 8 and make our way over, and because we had to make frequent stops.  People were getting out a breath and some of them wanted to make a stop for a smoke break, which made no sense to me.  If you are out of breath climbing the stairs, why constrict your lungs even more by smoking… but regardless I still love my classmates.  We made it to the top and decided to walk a far as we could to the other side.  Lots of complaining on not being able to make because there were so many stairs were exclaimed and others didn’t want to go that far because of how steep the stairs were.  Josie, Alessandro and I made it all the way to tower 2 before we turned back for the Slide.  Josie convinced me to take it again since I was the one that wasn’t too thrilled about doing it again because of money reasons (“You have not done it with us yet! Suck it up, be a man and just do it!”).  This time was not as enjoyable as the first.  This was due to the women in front of me.  We all wanted to go fast, but the women in front of us were going as slow as snails down this slide.  Not wanting to crash into them I was watching my speed.  Eventually this backed up 8 people on the slide.  Finally we made it back to the bottom and made the 2 hour trip back to the school. 

 

Anyone travelling to China needs to see the Great Wall.  It is a very impressive sight.  Even if you don’t stay very long is it is a great experience.  If I could I would have spent all day on the wall going from one side to the other, but having only a few hours on it each time I couldn’t.  Every year there is a marathon that people can run on the Great Wall.  Eventually I would love to do this.  I would have to do a lot of training for it since right now 10 miles at an 8:25 minute pace kicks my butt and that is on relatively flat ground. Eventually I will come back to china and visit the other sections of the wall.