the great wall of china.

Yesterday morning was one I'll always remember. Growing up and learning about The Great Wall I'd always tell myself that I was going to visit there someday. I never thought that day would be when I was 22 and living here!

The other day we ran into a lady who hooked us up with a tour guide who spoke English and a car that would take us to the Wall. They picked us up early that morning and it only took us about an hour to drive there. Another side note, it's freezing here! I was not loving the cold but once we got hiking I warmed up. Freezing though for me was in the 50's so I'm gonna die coming back to Utah!!

When driving towards the mountains they reminded me of Utah and I loved it! As we started getting closer you would look closely and what looked like rocks in weird zig zag lines was the Great Wall! 

I'm not sure exactly which part we hiked but it was fun!! They have certain tours that you can do and we only did a very very VERY small portion of it. 

That thing is so stinkin hard to climb!! You climb stairs, but they aren't all even, and sometimes you felt like you were lunging to climb them! There's my workout for the week;) haha

Every so often they had these little fort-like buildings that you could stop at and take pictures. If I remember right there were about 5 or 6 total until we made it to the top. For some reason I thought the Great Wall was more long and you just walk across it. But nope. You hike UP.

The weather warmed up on the hike up so it was perfect fall weather. And absolutely gorgeous!! It took us about 2 hours to get to the very top and back. Coming down was hard on my knees and I felt like an old woman trying to go down! Haha

One of my favorite parts of Beijing are all the foreigners! While hiking we met some girls from Russia, a group of men from Pakistan, and another group from India. Of course the men asked to take a picture with me. It was funny because one of the Indian men told me that I looked exactly like his girlfriend that lived in Switzerland so he had to take a picture to send to her. I'm not really sure if I believe that story though hahah We had a lot of people ask if we were students from Germany because I guess there were a lot of German tour groups. I also had a lot of people ask if I was Swedish! I guess it's the blonde hair.

The Great Wall really was stunning and I still can't believe I'm here in China! Crazy exciting things have been able to happen with this experience and I wouldn't want it any other way.

loves.