A Great Day at the Great Wall

Sorry that I haven't posted anything this week but nothing really all that interesting other than staying up doing homework and showing up to 6 hours of Chinese class a day...
Well today we went to the Great Wall of China, the Mutianyu section to be exact. Apparently the Mutianyu section of Great Wall used to serve as the northern barrier defending the capital and the imperial tombs. It's located in the northeast part of Beijing about an hour and fifteen minutes away.
I made some bad and good choices last night totally knewing that I had to meet my class at 7:50 at the east gate. I stayed up until 2am watching Juno with my neighbor down the hall. I woke up with Andy standing over me saying, dude its almost 7:50! My response was "no way you're kidding right?"
I was so glad that I packed everything in my backpack before watching the movie last night otherwise i'd be in so much trouble.
I got ready and got to the east gate at 7:55 and the busses didn't get here yet so I was ok.

It took a little bit more than an hour getting to the Mutianyu section which wasn't bad at all. The bus was like a Southwest bus so quite comfortable to ride on.
Our teacher, Wei Laoshi, took the cable car along with 3 other students while the rest of us walked up. Surprisingly without breakfast and 5 hours of sleep, I managed to be the first person to get all the way up without collapsing. It took less than half an hour to climb the stairs but honestly it felt like I was stuck on a stairmaster machine and I couldn't get off and was forced to just keep going up.

I checked my cell phone just because I thought it would be ridiculous to have reception all the way at the Great wall but surprisingly i had 3 bars which is crazy to me haha
I really wish I remembered to bring my slinky though, oh and one of the many random thoughts that crossed my mind were "I wonder if border patrol back home would go to this extreme"

So we all got up there and had lunch and then came back down, once we got back down to ground level we were bombarded by people holding tshirts yelling in bad English "you want tshirt you get good price"



I'm getting more pictures from the other classmate's cameras on Monday but for now, you can check out the 30 something pics that I uploaded here:
http://flickr.com/photos/24737890@N07/sets/72157604477990620/