I’m still pretty tired from all of this jet lag, I keep waking up really early! I was excited for today though. Today was the day that we went to see the Great Wall. I have to say; the term Wall is pretty misleading. It should be renamed the Great Stairs of China. Seriously, just getting to the Great Wall was quite the hike within itself. Two of the people on our trip opted to take the gondola up to the Wall, but the rest of us decided to rough it out and climb the rickety slabs of rock up to the top. Once we were there, things didn’t get much better. There was nothing flat about this wall, which shattered my vision of what the Great Wall was all about.
After we had fun on the Great Wall, we went down to more shops to make bargains with the locals. They can be quite vicious, I don’t like it and I always feel bad when they whine about their children being hungry and give me their sob stories and make me feel like crap for not buying their stuff at a ridiculously high price. I did end up getting some stuff, including a Chinese fisherman’s hat. And I forgot to mention that there was also a camel on site, and none of us have any idea why.
For lunch, we drove down from the wall to an outdoor restaurant. There were lots of dogs running around. When we ordered our food, we literally saw a guy come out, scoop a fish out of the pond and throw it onto the grill. Turns out, that was the fish we ordered. Then the bowl of chicken we got included not only tender chicken meat, but the organs, feet, and even a head. It was gross, but Di Gao enjoyed the foot and casually ate it like it was nothing. I didn’t say anything, but I’m pretty sure that we ate dog that day cause we had a lot of mystery meat (what else is new here) and this place seemed to like to kill whatever was on location and cook it. Oh yea, the drinks were warm too, but once again, what else is new. They don’t know what ice is here in China.