THE SUMMER WALL OF CHINA or wait was it THE SUMMER PALACE and THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA sounds right

Today we went to the Great Wall of China and the summer palace. Two places I’ve always wanted to visit.

First we took a chair lift up from the base of the mountain to the top, where we got on the path of the Great Wall next to a big turret.  At the Great Wall we walked up, and down, and up, and down, a billion steps, literally a billion. Some steps were very steep. We went to a part where it was decayed and broken and not-taken-care of. There were some parts where the wall was totally dilapidated because intruders came and took the wall apart for the bricks and stone to build their houses. When I was thinking about it before, I thought that it would be more crowded, but it wasn’t as crowded as I thought it would be.

DO YOU KNOW AT LEAST ONE OF THESE INTERESTING FACTS?

• the Great Wall took about 1,000,000 (one million) people to build it
• it took 280 years to finish the wall
• it was started over 2,000 years ago by emperor Qin (“ch-in”) who was the first emperor of china (and did the terracotta warriors, more on that later!)
• most of the people who built the wall were political prisoners and slaves
• the wall itself is more than 2,000 miles long
• if all of the wall was connected it would be about 5,555 miles long

I was extremely exited we were on the great wall of China. I thought that I would never be able to do this before this trip. It was surreal standing there on the great wall of China. WOWIE!

 

 

 

After hiking the wall, we did a super cool slalom downhill toboggan ride down to the bottom.  Daddo was going so fast he kept crashing into mom, against the rules!  When we got to the bottom, dad and I negotiated to get a Chinese shirt. The woman asked 280 yuan, and we got it for only 50 yuan. Dad made us do the math and it was 230 off, which is 82%. Our negotiation style was to walk away like we didn’t even want it.

After the great wall we went to the summer palace that is all man-made even the river. We climbed all the way to the top. Up there we saw a god with many arms, hands, eyes, and heads. We took a dragon boat to the other side of the river when we were about to leave. We had an amazing day. (OF WALKING!!)