Day 14 -- Beijing, China

We woke up at 7:30am and made it to breakfast by 8:15am. We met our guide Maggie at 9:00am and left for a three-hour drive to the Great Wall at Simatai, north of Beijing. I was kind of bummed about having such a long ride, but when we pulled up and saw the amazing view, I felt like it was worth it. Before the long trek up to the Great Wall, we ate at a little restaurant in the small town there. The food was decent, but very traditional. The restaurant was tiny, only one room and two tables. The kitchen was in a different building and I’m sure it was little more than a private home kitchen. The bathroom was a small cold room with a squat pot and was quite slick due to what I hope was water frozen on the floor. We couldn’t flush because the water was drained to keep it from freezing, so they let us all go, then brought in a bucket of water to wash everything down. After lunch, we walked about one and a quarter kilometers on a paved path of varying grades, sometimes with steps and sometimes just sloped, until we reached the wall itself. There is a cable car to reach the wall as well, but it was closed for the winter. Partway up, the four of us each obtained our own personal escorts. They were local women who said they were farmers but apparently doubled as vendors. They each picked one of us and stuck by us the entire way up. Dad’s had a striped hat, Daniel’s had a red hat, Mom’s had a brown coat, and mine had a purple coat. It was hard at first to see who belonged to who, but we walked in different pairs or split up, went ahead, lagged behind, etc. and it became quite evident. Maggie talked to me some on the way up and said that she thought I was 16. I know I look young, but that’s 10 years off!! We managed to go to seven towers and covered about 5km when it was all said and done. Daniel actually made it up between the ninth and tenth towers to take some photos, but the rest of us chose to hold back and rest while he did it as we all have bad knees. Daniel’s red hat lady followed him the whole way up beyond where the rest of us stopped. He decided to buy a book from her since that is what we buy from the places we visit. On the way down, we watched four people ride the zip line down towards the village. The line took them over water and looked fun, but also a little scary. They put you in a harness and used karabiners to attach the harness to some leather straps and the leather straps to the mechanism on the zip line. The problem I have with it is that I’m sure they are using Chinese karabiners…not the quality I would want to rely on…I would totally do this in the States though where I could be sure of the safety. We spent three hours at the Great Wall and got some great pictures. Back in the van for another three-hour drive. On the way I decided to listen to some Chinese language podcasts on my iPod. The “Bars” lesson was particularly interesting and said some great things like “I’m drunk” (Wo he zui de), “I’m still sober” (Wo hai hen qing xing de), and “I need to puke” (Wo xiang tu). Pretty useful stuff. We met Netta back at the hotel at 5:45pm. Mom and Dad changed rooms so that Netta could stay the last night with them and save some money. They wanted to change to a double room with two large beds, but apparently double room means something else. They ended up in a room with two single beds and got a rollaway for Netta. They decided it would be too much hassle to switch back, so they just dealt with it. I soaked my feet in hot water for a while to get them warmed up again before we went to Outback Steakhouse for dinner again. I figure it is justifiable to go out for Western food one more time since we will probably not have access to much while we are in Changsha for the next five days. We don’t know exactly what to expect there, but Mom’s travel agent/ friend even said to us that it would be ‘boring’ and that it is ‘communist country.’ We enjoyed another great dinner and walked around in the adjoining hotel for a bit before going outside to catch a taxi back to the hotel. There was a line of them, so we went to the first one. Before we could even get in or say where we wanted to go, the driver told us no and pointed to the car behind us. Of course my dad got pissed off and slammed the door. He thought better of that, opened the door again, took note of the driver’s ID number, then slammed the door again (I’m not even sure that we would even know who to report him to, but we got the number anyway). On the way to the next cab in line, Dad grabbed the taxi’s rear window wiper and flipped it over. When we got in the next taxi, the driver was laughing hysterically and pointing. My dad called the first driver an idiot in Chinese (bai chi) and the new driver agreed and took us to the hotel. We watched DVDs there until 11:00pm when we went to bed.