Today was an early start. We left the hotel at 8 AM to go to the wall. It was about a 2 hour drive there, but when we were getting close, all of a sudden the landscape turned to mountains. We got to a parking spot for our bus, but still had to walk up a hill lined with open shops with souvenir stuff. After bargaining our way through the shops, we finally caught a glimpse of the wall. It took a long uphill climb just to get to the wall itself, but when we got up there, I was pretty much blown away. Not only the thought of being on the Great Wall of China, but also the view from up there were just too much. I went a little crazy taking pictures from on top of the wall. We started walking down the wall and the view only got more impressive from there. From different viewpoints along the wall, you could see how the wall went on for miles and miles in both directions until it either ran out of sight or over a mountain. We all made sure to get plenty of pictures from atop the wall while walking along it. The weather was really clear when we got on top of the wall, so that made for great views the whole time we were up there. There was one section of the wall that was about a 200 foot climb of straight stairs, and the stairs themselves were really old, so some of them were cracked and broken. We all felt like champions when we got to the top of the stairs to the next turret of the wall. The view from up there was easily the best view we got all day, and probably one of the most impressive I have seen my entire life. We spent some time up there getting group pictures and taking in the view. The way back down was not much easier because the steps weren’t uniform, meaning some were steep while others were long. When we got back to the point where we had started, there was a slide going all the way back down to the bottom. You had to get on a little car and operate the brake with a lever. The car would go down the slide as fast as you would let it, going around twists and turns and some drops. It was so much fun. One of the students who is going around with us, Vivien, said she had been on the slide 5 times, and it was still just as fun as the first time. So, now that we were back at the bottom of the mountain where all the shops were, I made sure to get a rice farmer’s hat (a stereotypical souvenir) and we left to go back to Beijing. We ate at a restaurant that was like a Chinese CiCi’s. The Chinese like to put a bunch of different strange combinations on their pizza, so eating there was pretty much just as strange as eating anywhere else. Afterwards, we went back to the hotel where we relaxed for a little bit until later that night when we were deciding what to do. Some of us got hungry again, so we decided to go see how different the KFC was in China. It turns out that the meals are much smaller here than in America. They also have a bunch of different stuff on their menu like seafood. We went to the grocery store to get ice cream after that and Chinese ice cream is much sweeter than ice cream in the States. It’s almost too sweet. That was the end of our adventures for the day. I have to say, I think today has probably been my favorite day so far.