One Blonde in a Sea of Brunettes

Friday September 3
Today was somewhat cold and rainy. BUT on the bright side we were able to trek the infamous Great Wall, well not exactly. This was just a small section of the Great Wall that is closest to Beijing, it was used in the past as a fort for generals and army officials with an enormous wall surrounding it. So it is considered a portion of the wall, but is not actually connected to the main wall. Non-the-less it was incredible! The stairs were torturous and there were places where the steps had sunk in from all the pressure of people walking on it. I wish I had counted the steps I climbed, but I was too focused on the beauty of the place! The mountains surrounding the valley were enormous and looked similar to the misty Chinese paintings.  Of course my good camera’s battery died that day so I was only able to take about 2 pictures with it, fortunately I did have my other small camera with me though that I was able to get a few good pictures out of. My friend Laura and I raced to the top to catch up with the boys and it was so glorious when we finally made it to the top! Professor Chittick only stuck around for a few minutes before he was off to finish the entire wall in less than an hour! (I couldn’t believe he made it! Most of us only made it to the highest peak!)
    After a really really good start to the day we went to lunch on the second floor of a cloisonné factory.  The factory itself was kind of not even worth mentioning, but the vases and trinkets that they made were beautiful! Though they charged WAY more than any other place that sells cloisonné. Plus the food was good that day too, and they even gave us a bottle of baijiu so we could ganbei! Professor Chittick seemed somewhat reluctant at first but we finally convinced him.
 Afterwards we headed to the Ming tombs, which we later found out were destroyed (completely except the architecture surrounding it during the cultural revolution.) The scenery was quite beautiful, but since everything was just a reconstruction of the tombs it seemed more touristy than an actual site worth seeing. The history of course was interesting though. I think we had a few more destinations on our list to accomplish that day but everyone was seriously exhausted from the day. So we took showers and headed out to our hot pot dinner!! All it was, was a huge pot (like thing) in the middle of the table full of boiling water with lots of little plates of veggies, meats, mushrooms, spices, sauces and everything else Chinese you can think of. It was a sort of difficult process though, you needed to pick up what you wanted to cook, hold it in with your chopsticks until it was done then dip it in your sauce and thennn eat it. It didn’t help either that there were 11 of us trying to do it all at once, but eventually we got the hang of it.
That night we were feeling adventurous, as always, and decided to check out the bar scene in houhai. It was so much fun! When we got there everyone was dancing in a really large courtyard (all synchronized) while others played Chinese hacky sack. As we started walking along the river next to all the bars we started to notice how ridiculous the prices of drinks were! Some places even had drinks for 65 kuai!! That’s almost ten dollars! I imagine a lot of tourists just go there, or big wig business people. But we decided to keep walking and see what we find. There were some street vendors and our friend Sean found such an awesome shirt! It was a picture of Barack Obama dressed as Mao Zedong and the shirt said “Obamao.” I really wonder if people here think that Obama will become communist and start starving people and whatnot. Obviously I hope that doesn’t happen, but I am curious to know what they think. We finally stumbled upon a really cool little bar that played funky live flamenco music with cheap drinks! We thoroughly enjoyed that, and on our way home Meg was kissed by one of the bar promoters which definitely caused a scene, and we all used an incredibly atrocious public bathroom. Yuck.