Wow....that's quite a wall

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The Great Wall of China can not actually be seen from the moon but it the longest man made structure.  It took millions of men, an untold amount of money and a whole lot of years to build and it was completely ineffective at its task of keeping the Mongols out.  It's rumored that Ghengis Khan simply bribed the sentry and came right through.   Yet despite the fact that this wall must be one of history's most failed government projects it is now one of those must-see destinations on the globe and I admit that I was not disappointed.

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We hired a shuttle driver to take us out to the Mutianyu section of the wall.  We left the hostel early and we were at the wall by just after 7:00am.  This was a blessing because the seven people in our van were literally the only people on this 3km section of the wall.  As if hiking along the wall wasn't cool enough, having it all to ourselves was an unexpected treat.  We had about 4 hours to hike up and back and although this may seem a lot for such a small area the wall seemed to be constantly going either straight up or straight down, so it was quite a lot of work moving around.   For four hours, we hiked, took pictures, pretended to be invading Mongolians, and just sat and admired the view.  It was a beautiful morning.

the Monguls are attacking!
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I will say that the souviener sellers at the bottom of the wall were the most aggressive I've seen on this vacation.  Constant calls of "One dollar" and a woman who tried to sell me a bottle of water for 3 times what I ended up paying for it.  A bit of craziness.

Speaking of bargining, we spent the afternoon after the Great Wall trying our hand at shopping.  I feel like I got really good deals, but of course the shopkeepers probably still sold me things at 10x what they paid for it.  Regardless I'm happy that I'm not bad at bargining.  In fact, I'm so not that into the shopping that I'm pretty good at bargining because I don't have a problem walking away.  I've gotten every price I've asked for although maybe I'm just not asking low enough!

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I will say that Beijing has grown on me a bit, too.  I still don't love it but I don't have my initial negative reaction to it either.  It is also much better at night when all the lights are on and you can't see the smog.   Anyway, my time here is up and I'm heading on the train to Xi'an!