The Great Wall
I forgot to introduce the fourth member of our group at the end of the last post. Chrissy’s friend Emily, who lives in Beijing, met us at the airport and accompanied us through the rest of our time in Beijing. Besides being a really nice person, it was also invaluable to have Emily with us since she speaks the language and could negotiate for us. I think she had a lot of fun also. She even learned how to tell a “That’s what she said” joke.
Saturday morning we took a bus about an hour outside of the city and arrived at The Great Wall of China. This was definitely one of the parts of the trip that I was looking forward to the most, and it did not disappoint. If you can’t tell from the pictures, it was really cold, I think somewhere around 15-20 degrees with a biting wind.
The view from the Wall was amazing. The wall was built on top of the highest parts of the mountains to give the Chinese protection against the Mongols by allowing them to defend themselves as well as attack their invaders.
It’s pretty surreal to stand on a structure that has been standing for over 500 years and think of all the history that is contained in that place. We hiked up the Wall to the highest point of the Badaling section where we were. Here are just a few pictures. I also added a bunch to Facebook and I’ll post everything to Flickr once I get home.
