Great Wall Weekend

So a couple weeks ago I went to the Great Wall with 35 other IES students along with staff and RAs. After an afternoon on the wall we drove to this remote village on a hill right adjacent to the famous wall. If you look at the pictures you will see the guard towers atop the hills surrounding the village, it was quite a site to behold during sun set and in the early morning mist/smog. We spent the night in the spare rooms offered by the villagers who also provided us with a delicious dinner and breakfast. The beds were long raised platforms with a thin pad that slept 6-8 people. My room accommodated eight girls packed together like sardines, each with our own pillows and blankets. It was pretty chilly that night and there was no heating in the rooms, so it was actually very comfortable sleeping with so many other people in one room. When I woke up and went to put on my boots I found that we were not the only ones sleeping in the room that night, there were large flying insects everywhere but particularly burrowed in the creases of my dirty clothes and nestled in my fur-lined boots. I guess even insects need cozy beds at night. There was a sun rise hike at 5:30 that I opted out of because my knees, feet, calves, thighs, and everything else above and below my waist was extremely sore from the 10km hike along the wall the previous day. Let me tell you, "walking" along the Great Wall is certainly no leisurely stroll in the park. Certainly one of the most physically exhausting things I have ever done in my life. After breakfast we started our long walk back to the tour bus. Because we were located in such a remote area the tour bus was unable to pick us up in the village, so that meant we had to walk for two hours from the village to the closest highway carrying all our hiking gear and over-night bags across dirt roads, down the mountain, into a valley, through several more villages, passing stray chickens and dogs and wandering children, back up another mountain, and finally we arrived at a gas station where we met the tour bus to bring us back to Beijing. It must have been quite a site to see for the locals who kept offering us rides in the back of pick-up trucks. It was definitely an adventure and I enjoyed (almost) every minute!! (There was an hour or two on the Great Wall I thought I might die from some combination of exhaustion, dehydration, and heat stroke but I made it back alive!)