The Great Wall

The day we went to the Great Wall was the day I sweated the most in all the days in my life combined. It was a fairly lengthy bus ride there. Upon arrival we were attacked by shop owners selling the same things at each store, however, I was tempted enough to buy myself an Asian conical hat. Many people know them buy hats that farmers usually wear. That day I decided that I needed to put my camera down for a while so I did not bring it. It was a hard decision because who wouldn't bring their camera to the Great Wall. I had my phone though, so that's all I needed considering how foggy it was anyway. We descended up what seemed like 6 million steps just to get to the wall itself. By that time I was literally soaked all the way through from sweating, which has never happened to me before. I felt somewhat sick so I rested for a few minutes and sketched some crude but decent sketches, in my opinion anyway. We started from the tower 7 and I found a couple friends and we decided to walk up to tower 23 which was about 2 miles of all steps of various heights. Little did we know it was opposite in the direction we wanted to go to get down which was a slide. My friend Sam and I figured that out and we only had an hour until we were supposed to meet. Once we got to tower 14, we had about 20 minutes left. We had to run about a mile of just steps to get back in time. It was awful but one of the most memorable experiences I will have looking back. The wall was all renovated so I felt like I wasn't seeing the whole thing. The idea of the wall when it was built was to build it in the hardest places to get which is the ridge line of the mountains, as it gave an overview of the surrounding land. Knowing I was walking on top of something that protected China for thousands of years was astonishing, especially thinking about how hard it was to walk on it, let alone build it.