I posted this yesterday, but my parents said it wasn't showing up on our blog, so I'm trying to re-post it, this time without as many pictures and hopefully that will work. If the other post ever shows up, there will be two identical posts of the Great Wall except this one will have only one photo.
We woke up early again this morning and ate breakfast and went for a walk near our hotel before meeting our group at 8:30 and heading to The Great Wall. TongJie and Ezekiel have been excited for months about seeing the Great Wall of China. It was about an hour and a half bus ride - Beijing is a huge city, so it takes a long time just to get out of the city, and the Great Wall is in the mountains so it's outside of the city. The section of the wall that we went to, surprisingly, was not very busy at all, so that was really nice. It was very hot again today, and going on the Wall requires a lot of steep climbing, so we weren't sure how far we'd get. The steps are quite steep, and also the heights of the steps are uneven - some are low, shallow steps, and some are tall (and hard for short little legs!) but the boys did a great job climbing up many, many steps and we stopped at a few different fortresses along the way and saw some amazing views. When it was time to go back down, we had not fully anticipated the difficulty Ezekiel was going to have but we quickly realized he was going to need a lot of help because of his lack of depth perception. Although going up was okay for him because he could see the front of the steps as we were approaching them, he was almost paralyzed with caution as we started down the steps, even holding onto my hand. We figured out a way to make it work though. On the way up, he had sort of invented a number system for the steps to categorize them based on height: "1" was the lowest steps, "2" was medium (like a regular stair step that we are used to), and "3" was the high steps, plus there were even a few "4" level steps that were giant steps even for an adult. So, going down, we simply used his number system and I told him what each step was before he stepped down. It worked pretty well and we made it with lots of time to spare before the 12:30 meeting time - even enough time to get popsicles at the gift shop next to the parking lot!
Next we went to a jade factory and then had lunch. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at the site of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, which will also house the 2022 Winter Olympics. We could have done without stopping at the Olympic Stadium - we didn't go in or anything, but just walked around outside in the gigantic parking lot with almost no shade so people could take pictures, but it was so hot and we were already tired! By the time we got back to our hotel, it was 5:00 and the boys were worn out. There was an optional actobat show that TongJie and Jeff had planned on going to, but it started at 5:30 so the people who were going didn't even get off the bus at the hotel - they just went directly to the show. Because we were all so tired, TongJie decided that he didn't want to go to the show after all, so we all just went back to our hotel room which I think ended up being a good choice. I wish they would have gotten to see it, but I'm glad that TongJie was able to get to bed at a decent time and not overdo it wearing himself out. The Great Wall was most definitely the highlight of today and I'm glad we got to go there early in the day and that it was not crowded at all - we got lots of great pictures! We remembered to take our tablet today, so we got some pictures on the tablet so they're easy to put on our blog.
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