The wall is quite big

We've just arrived back at our hostel in Beijing after climbing the great wall and spending a night in a farmer's house at the village of Yanshing. We got up at 4am so that we could actually be on the wall to see the sunrise. It was lovely, because we, a group of 4 girls, were the only ones there just surrounded by mountains with former Mongolia on one side and China on the other. I'm really happy we didn't go to the restored part of the wall, Bandaling, which is the closest to Beijing, but covered with tourists and souvenir shops. The part of the wall we went to was very authentic and the real thing with stones just crumbling down. So we did have to be careful with some steps to not go tumbling down the ravine, but it was quite fun. It took us a bit more than 2 hours to get to tower number 6 and got back down in about 45 minutes.

Our driver named Noodles (love the name!) was really friendly and told us several stories and facts about Beijing and it was interesting to find out his thoughts of various subjects I shouldn't mention on here. The whole 3 hour trip each way on the Highway to Tibet where we very oddly passed a fake Disneyland castle in the middle of mountains, one specific Chinese song was playing and kept on repeating, which he really seemed to love, but it was funny every time it started over again!

This morning after the hike, we had Chinese breakfast at a small local eating place, which consisted of dumplings, some sort of fried bread and rice soup.

                                    

This afternoon we're going to bike around the art district, meet some other people this evening and then i'm catching a 12-13 hour train journey to Nanjing at around 11pm tonight.