Trip to the Great Wall

The Great Wall

Every weekend ACC arranges activities for the students. These are actually fairly well attended because we get the opportunity to go to some really interesting places. This weekend we went to Chang Cheng (also known as the Great Wall). The trip was a lot of fun, some people were expecting it to be unbearable because of the heat. We left the school at 8:30am, it was a 2 hour drive to the wall. There are three places you can access the wall that are near Beijing, I forgot the name of this one, but it is famous for having a lot of trees around and having beautiful scenery. It was quite a hike to get up to the wall. You walk up a path for about a 1/2 mile until with trees on either side until you get to the wall. Then we walked along the wall, taking pictures and stopping to look at the scenery.

It was hot! But also a lot of fun.

Strangely, one of the girls we were walking with saw a friend of hers from college who is studying in Beijing at another program walking on the wall. He was with 3 other friends and one of them was from Yale. It's really funny how you meet people you didn't have any contact with at school in foriegn countries. After walking back down it was 1pm and we had an hour before the bus left to go back to the school. Since it was super hot and we were all exhausted from the long trek, we sat in the shade eating ice cream. I have been searching for the past few days for Corn flavored ice cream, which they apparently sell everywhere. The two places I went to near the school were all out when I asked. There are so many little shops surrounding the Great Wall b/c so many tourists go there, so I knew one of the places selling ice cream bars had to have it. The first place I asked had corn ice cream, and it was wonderful. Next on my list to try is red bean, and then pea, although I have a feeling that it won't be nearly as good as the corn flavor. We got back to the school at around 4 pm and I was exhausted so I took a long nap. At 8 I went out to dinner. We went out for Japanese food and it was wonderful, I realized how much I miss sashimi and sushi.