Long Vacation: Day 5

Drumroll please, this was the best day in Beijing!

And it includes my tour of the Great Wall, naturally.

It started at 7:30 when we all sleepily got into another grey van with a tour guide who looked Chinese but must have learned his English from an Aussie because he was sure rocking an Australian accent, it was the trippiest thing! A Chinese person with an Australian accent, try to imagine it for a second if you can. We’d paid for our tour to include the Ming Tombs as well as the Great Wall but had no idea plans to visit both jade and silk factories and also participate in a traditional Chinese tea-serving ceremony. Little did we know that each of those was just a marketing ploy to get us to buy their over-priced merchandise but ya know, all in the experience, right?

We started at the jade factory where they told us a 5 minute history of the culture of jade which was interesting but then they set us free in their store where we dinked around looking at cool stuff but keeping our money safely in our wallets to spend elsewhere. We picked up two blonde Danish girls here who were on the rest of the tour with us. We talked to them a little but one of them didn’t speak English very well. They were on a trip around the world and dressed interestingly. Mostly it was just funny and random :)

Next we visited the Ming Tombs, which were honestly a disappointment, but had their small perks. We chose the underground part of the tour that was just a re-creation of how it would have looked immediately after the Ming emperors were buried but it was still kind of neat. I felt a little jipped that everything was re-created and all the treasures has been moved to a museum and the boxes holding the bodies were just replicas, but when we asked our tour guide about it he simply said, “This isn’t Egypt!” Absolutely right, Leo, China is certainly not Egypt. For some reason that just works with everything I’ve learned about China at this point ;)

The best part about the tour was the ghost gate we passed on our way in and eventually had to go out, saying some sort of anti-ghost spell and brushing ourselves off so that the evil spirits couldn’t come back to the real world with us. We passed these ladies as they were coming out and they were all squealing as they went in, it was pretty hilarious :)


Then..we took one of the most windy/long bus rides ever, maybe due to hunger, tiredness, or anticipation of seeing the Great Wall but whatever the case it just seemed like it would NEVER end. It was one of those times that you turn to the person next to you and ask them, “Wait, how long have we been here?” because you honestly can’t remember anything before it. We did a lot of things to entertain ourselves and my favorite was definitely taking close-ups of eachother’s faces while they weren’t looking. Priceless :) And at one point I un-veiled my ability to bark like a dog to these people who thought they knew me after 3 months and they were amazed. From that point on I was referred to as “the little barking girl” by the tour guide. Sweet :) I was sitting on one of the seats facing backwards and had to switch a kid seats because the bends in the road were making me nauseous. Eventually we stopped for lunch and had one of the best meals I’ve had in China and then we rode a couple more minutes to Mu Tian Yu part of the Great Wall.

I got to do the Great Wall right. We bought tickets that included a ski lift up and a toboggan (like the Alpine Slide) down. It gave us maximum amount of time on the Great Wall and let’s be honest, it’s freaking amazing to say that I’ve done each of those on the Great Wall.

In a lot of ways the Great Wall was not what I imagined but there are not many more words to describe it so we go with pictures!!


Two thumbs up for the Great Wall!! I can check something off my Bucket List :)




Before I came to the Great Wall I had heard that it was mostly stairs. I am here to tell you this is absolutely true. Good thing I’ve had lots of practice since I’ve been in China, living and teaching on the fourth floor.


There are connecting guard towers in between stretches of the wall and with the amount of time we had there wasn’t much time to explore but Debbie, Joey and I booked it as fast as we could to this one over-looking a great stretch of wall and while the stairs nearly killed us it was worth it!


This was the background on my desktop for awhile :)



See what I mean? Stairs..


One last look at the Great Wall! We had to meet the tour guide soon but I really couldn’t peel myself away from the awesome sights around me! This is a restored part of the wall but even to keep it up is quite a feat! Someday I want to go to an original section of the wall but that will have to be an adventure for another time.


On the toboggan down!

We hurried and bought “I hiked the Great Wall” T-shirts and piled in our van and slept the whole way down. Spent but content :)

We went to the silk factory and saw a couple silk worms and raw silk sheets and were left to buy their stuff again and walked around the corner to the tea ceremony, and although it was once again just to get us to buy stuff it was still cool. The tea stuff is something that the Chinese government does for free at that particular tea house to keep the culture of tea-serving alive. Way fun to participate in something as central as tea to Chinese culture in so many ways! Seriously, it’s everywhere, in everything. There is a green tea version of Sprite, even! I could drink two of the herbal teas and although I wasn’t that impressed by the taste I felt very immersed in the experience. This is a part of life for so many here!


That was it for the tour, and I bet you know how we finished the day ;)

Would it surprise you to know I had to forcefully sit on my suitcase to convince the zipper to do its thing, and still had to put random items such as one mate of a shoe and my hairbrush in other people's suitcases?

It shouldn’t!