China Vacation: Day 2

After a wonderful night’s sleep we had an amazing breakfast buffet in the hotel.  If I haven’t mentioned it before, it’s worth mentioning now: Mark having status with Marriott is incredible.  We get to have the yummy breakfast buffet every morning…for free!  We also get to go to the executive lounge any time we need/want to and get free drinks and snacks.  Pretty awesome.  Ok, back to our day…

We talked to the kids after breakfast and then headed downstairs to await our taxi that would take us to Mutianyu to see the Great Wall.  I have been waiting to see the Great Wall for ages.  I put it on my bucket list back in the 6th grade when I had to do a huge report on the Wall and build my own mini version of it (which was pretty awesome, by the way).  Here we are in the taxi on our way to Mutianyu.

Let me spend just a moment talking about drivers in China.  Mark warned me about them but I got to experience it and live to tell it.  First thing I noticed when we got into the taxi was the lack of seat belts for the back seat.  They are there, just not accessible.  They are covered by a huge seat cover.  I never realized how programmed I am to put on a seat belt until I don’t have a seat belt to put on.  I started to feel less confident I would survive yet another trip in a car (yesterday’s trip was still very fresh in my memory).  We got to see some really interesting buildings as we drove through Beijing.  They sure do love their tall buildings in the cities here.  This one was pretty cool looking.

 

Our taxi driver walked us to the ticket booth where we purchased our entrance fee ticket and tickets to ride the cable car up and down the mountain.  I didn’t fancy doing an hour or two hike just to get to step foot on the wall.  And we only had two hours until we had to be back to our taxi so time was of the essence.  This was the little street we walked up towards the cable car entrance.  Lots of little shops to catch the tourists and coax them into buying junk, uh I mean treasures to remind them of their visit. 

Here’s Mark in the cable car. 

The view from the wall was just incredible!  We had beautiful weather and could see for miles.  If you look to where the wall goes straight up the mountain and then turns left, this is the point where we hiked to.  Mark wanted to go farther but we ran out of time.   

Proof that I was on the wall!

Mark was there, too.

 

My thinking pose.  I’m sure I was thinking my legs were getting tired.

Mark, practicing his archery skills. 

 

Our “selfie” picture.  We have some really good pictures (that we asked other people to take) of the both of us on our camera but we forgot to pack the cord that gets those pictures onto the computer.  So these blog posts only include cell phone pictures.

Imagine walking on a stair climber in the gym…for 10 minutes straight…on a fast pace.  Now you have an idea of what these stairs did to our thighs.  Yes, those stairs go all the way up to the watch tower you see at the top in the picture. 

Here you can see all the way down to where we started.  On the way down we practically had the wall all to ourselves.

Hiking the Wall makes you thirsty, of course. 

 

We loved some of the signs we found.  

 

My first toilet experience in China (besides our hotel, of course).  Ugh, I was NOT prepared for this one.  And apparently it’s a BYOTP thing every where you “go”. 

 

Mark took me to Din Tai Feng for dinner after we hiked the Great Wall.  When Mark travels to Shanghai for work they always go to this restaurant since it’s one of the very few Chinese restaurants that he will eat at. 

 

This is a bread ball, thingy filled with red bean paste.  Sound weird but it was really good.  The paste inside is sweet and would be considered a dessert. 

These were so delicious.  Chicken dumplings. 

We had vegetable dumplings and some fried rice as well.  Mark ordered two other dishes but they never came so we ended up just paying the bill (which they charged us for the two entrees we didn’t get) and stopped at a grocery store on the way back to the hotel.  We found these awesome chocolate bars there. 

Our first full day in China was a success.  I loved being able to walk on the Great Wall and see how incredible it really is.  There are over 13,000 miles of the wall that branch out all over China.  We were blessed enough to visit just a small portion of it in Mutianyu.