Last post for Friday and the great wall

this is us getting out of the taxi we ended up taking from parking lot to parking lot. Turns out by the time we buckled our seat belts we had made it to the other parking lot. We should have just walked but chalk it up to a lesson learned.





every part of the wall you can see in this picture i walked on. This is the end of the second part we walked on and it was really satisfying to look back on what we had accomplished. It is pretty amazing that this wall is built up and down the mountains like it is. Also this is one of the least steep regions supposedly so it makes it even more impressive.



for some reason they had a bunch of bears living at the entrance / exit to the great wall we ended up at. We watched them for a while. They were pretty cute, running around, fighting, and the one climbing the structure to get closer to the little girl throwing food. The one depressing thing was the condition of the cage. There was a pretty consistent layer of feces covering a lot of the cage and a lot of the bears as well.

i also managed to catch some pics of the bears going for one another's eyes. Remember bears love eating eyes, if you ever encounter a bear in the wilderness cover your eyes!

this is jay, cong, and Eric at the end of the wall. Ok really it was just the end of where you could walk to. They bricked up the door in the tower so you could not walk on the other side. We still felt like we conquered the badaling section of the wall though.

an interesting great wall story, apparently they rented part of the wall out for a day to an organization that threw a giant party on the wall for a day. They had bbq all day and then danced all night. Problem is last year, a bunch of people decided to piss and shit on the wall instead of using the bathroom and got caught on camera. So no more party this year. People were pretty upset by this which makes sense. Can you imagine the reaction if a lot of people did that on the statue of liberty or the Washington monument.

below is just a pic of a tower and the wall leading up to it.

after we got back from the wall i ended up falling asleep for four hours waking up to grab dinner and going right back to bed. It was kind of amazing how much of a real hike it is just walking on the wall. i cannot imagine having to patrol it at night back in the day.

music recommendation, tom waits - small change - asylum. i think this was the first album were he switched to the gravelly voiced approach and started making something a little more experimental. i am sure someone will correct me if i am wrong. Either way, an album that covers a lot of emotion and has songs that you want to listen to in almost any mood.