You know when you're a little kid & it's your birthday & all you want to do is immediately open your presents, but your mom says you have to wait until your whole family is there so you don't get to open them for hours? That's how I felt the day we went to the Great wall of China. The day before we were supposed to go our tour guide told us that we needed to leave really early in the morning to get to the wall because it would take us about three hours from Beijing. The next day we did just that, we met up by 6 & headed on our way, I got comfortable in my seat & with Milo sleeping, tried to sleep a bit more too. & then the car stopped. I had thought that we were going straight to the wall, but the guide had other plans, so we stopped at a jade factory to learn about jade, where we ended up spending three hours, then we drove a little bit longer & got some lunch before we made it to the wall. It may not seem like a big deal, but I was so overly anxious to get there that I could hardly stand it, I admit I was getting a bit moody but, I couldn't help myself because I was so excited.
When we finally made it to the wall I was so happy & amazed. It blew my mind to see it in person. There is so much history & it is gigantic. You always are hearing about the Great wall of China & how long it is & how big it is, but seeing it in real life really blows your mind, especially to think how they built it all by hand. There are a few different tourist points on the wall, we opted to visit the Matianyu section which isn't as touristic or crowded, we took a gondola up & a slide down to the bottom! Walking along the wall was really cool, you are so much higher than any of the nearby villages & the greatness of the wall is so much more noticeable. We walked along towards the slide going up & down with the hills, up gigantic steps & through the guard towers. By the time we reached the slide my legs were so shaking from walking on so many steep slopes, haha, so I was pretty happy to have reached our destination. The slide is an alpine slide going down to the bottom where we caught the gondola. You weave between trees & bushes & are up pretty high, it was really fun to go down buuuut, a lot of people riding it didn't really understand how the sleds worked, so there was also a lot of stopping & bumping, haha.
The building of the Wall began in the 700's BC, to keep inner Asia separate, but over different dynasties & rulers the Walls location & formation was changed, but it continued being built until 1911. The sections of the wall that are in the best form & are most often visited we're built during the Ming dynasty between 1339-1644. & it is a UNESCO site :)
