We climbed the Wall of China today! (Sinclair, I think it really hit me today, I'm actually in China!) I can say with absolute certainty that this particular tourist attraction lives up to every expectation. And even exceeds some. The adventure started at the public bathroom at the entrance, which had an enormous line of bullying Chinese ladies. We waited patiently and paid our .50 Yuan (about 7 cents), only to be pushed into the most frantic bathroom situation I’ve ever seen. Just inside the door was a bucket that a few of the more adventurous women were using (no modesty here, girls). Once you were corralled into the room with the actual stalls you could see that the doors had been removed in order to facilitate faster transitions between “customers.” I dropped a squat, and before I had even pulled my pants up a woman was shoving me out the door so she could get in on the action. This was my introduction to the Great Wall, and I was already impressed.
Next we started the climb. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of scaling the Great Wall, let me use one word to describe it: vertical. People were actually pulling themselves up on their hands and knees because it was more like rock climbing than hiking. After about an hour and a half, a lot of panting, many many breaks, and being passed by a couple of old men with canes, we finally made it to the toboggan - our ride back down. Despite our exhaustion, we all agreed that the “hike” (I’m using that term loosely) was totally worth it. The weather was perfect and the skies were clear and the views were spectacular. The one thing that surprised me was how crowded it was the entire way. My image is of an empty, snaking, stone wall, but we were literally getting pushed out of the way by Chinese tourists, some of whom stopped to take their picture with us. My popularity spans continents apparently.
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