The Great Wall

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The Great Wall is pretty crazy to see.  It’s not a life-changing experience but it was good to be there.  I snapped some nice zoomed in black-and-white photos of myself.  Just you wait!

 

What surprised me most about the wall was the number of vendors and merchants there.  There were even some ON the wall itself, selling beer and Coke and candy bars.  They would hike up and come in through the holes and stairs on the bottom of the Chinese side of the wall, I guess.  I don’t think they were supposed to be there but whatever.

 

We took a cable-car up to the wall and took a toboggan down.  Both of which were pretty fun.

 

There were about a hundred vendors lining the dirt path up to the cable-car area, though.  That was also pretty shocking.  They all screamed at all of us when we walked by.  “I know you!”  “Do you want another t-shirt?”  “Do you want another hat?”  “One dollar!  One dollar!”  Sometimes I feel bad about not buying things from people, but I didn’t buy anything that time.  I felt like they really shouldn’t be at the Great Wall.  Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be there either.

 

The girl tour guide with SAS talked to me on the wall.  I was walking forward and she and Benny went back and forth a few time in Mandarin and then she started talking to me.  I wondered if Benny told her that she should talk to me because I wasn’t talking to anyone else.  She asked me about where I was from and what I studied and what I wanted to do with it and I asked her what she studied and what she had done for work so far and what she wanted to do later.  She used to teach English but said “kids these days” are too obnoxious for her so she moved on to giving tours.  It was nice to talk to her.  She also told me that Beijing University is the Harvard of China, and it has 30,000 people.  I was glad, because if it only had 6,000 like Harvard then life would just be hell for Chinese over-achievers.