Day 3 (August 3rd) Climbing the Great Wall

It's taking a little longer to post everything than I expected. My wisdom teeth surgery seems to have backfired. My body apparently didn't like the meds they gave me for swelling, infection, and pain. I can't keep any of them down. We talked to the doctor and now I'm off all meds. So far that has solved the nausea problem but now the pain is intense and always present. Not fun :( So now I'm trying to ignore pain and focus on blogging. This will be a long post with lots of pictures!

Our first night in China we fell asleep around 8PM or 9PM, and woke at 5AM! Jet lag didn't affect us too terribly, just turned us into those 'early to bed, early to rise' kind of people! They scheduled the Great Wall for the day after arriving to help knock us out of any jet lag slump - it worked!

Here are a few shots I took in the morning before we left. This is a view of the orphanage from the back. We had to walk on this path from our yurts to get inside the orphanage. Can you tell how foggy/smoggy it is?!

Here's the view from the opposite direction as the picture above. The 2 groups of girls slept in the yurts on the right and left, while the 2 boys slept in the middle one further back. We were all quite excited about the yurts but they were not what we expected. They definitely looked cool though :)

I loved this little circle arch :)

China had such pretty flowers. Here's one in the backyard.

Driving to our destinations on this trip was one of the most interesting things of all. It was so neat to observe and take China in as you pass by.

This is our whole team right outside the entrance to the Great Wall. It took a few hrs to get there, which gave us time to get our levels of excitement even higher!

Another group picture :)

There were quite a few of these cannons scattered about on the Great Wall. It was so crazy and surreal to be on something that is such a part of Chinese history. Not to mention it is one of the 7 wonders of the world! So unreal.

The Praying Mantis wanted to try climb the Great Wall too! Wonder how far he made it?

Comforting, right?

We took a ski lift type thing to get to a certain level of the Great Wall, where we could begin climbing. I took this picture from the ski lift but this is the 'toboggan' we would later take on our way down the Great Wall. The ride lasted at least 10 minutes and wasn't as scary as I was expecting. We each had our own little 'toboggan' with a lever we pushed to make it go faster/slower. It was definitely an experience!

Here is Katie and myself on this ski lift thing we rode. It took a while to get to the top. We didn't mind, it gave us time to take in the amazing view!

Here's another picture of us. We had some team members who were really faithful at taking pictures and now we're sharing them, so that is why I'm IN a lot of the pictures :)

Getting off the ski lift was QUITE the feat! It did not stop so it was up to us to jump off at just the right moment. As you can see the Chinese man is helping us out a bit :)

Such a beautiful place.

If you can't tell from my very RED and SWEATY face, it was a hot and humid day.

Here is Amanda, Katie, and me, in front of one of the many 'buildings' located along the wall. This picture is so unreal to me now. It doesn't feel like this actually happened, that I really did climb the Great Wall. It seems like too amazing of a thing to have actually happened! I guess this picture proves it did!

Our team eventually broke off into little groups, as some people wanted to turn back, or wanted to go a different route. In this picture is my group - Hannah, Katie, myself, and Jonathan. We had SO much fun! We were miserably hot and so thirsty and tired, but we managed to laugh just about the whole time. Jonathan was quite the sport to put up with us three :)

We searched all over for a bathroom, and finally (after a long detour due to our failure to read Chinese maps correctly) we found a bathroom! We had only encountered American toilets so far, so you can imagine our surprise when we opened the stall doors and found.....

the Squatty Potty! (the name is pretty self explanatory)

We had American toilets at the places we stayed throughout the trip, and sometimes when we were out and about, but we had become well acquainted with the good ol' squatty potty by the time the trip was over.

Here's a video I sneakily recorded of this sweet little family climbing the great wall. I'm guessing it was a grandmother, a mother, and her son.

Our first full day in China was such a blast, as you can hopefully tell from these pictures. It was such an experience and started our trip off in such an amazing way!