Mutianyu and the Great Wall

Today we woke up at around 5:45 am to set out on an adventure to conquer the Great Wall of China. Our hostel organized a trip for about 15 of us, which made it pretty easy. For less than $30 USD, we got transportation from Beijing to Mutianyu, about an hour and a half north of Beijing. Today's weather was much better than yesterday, about 94 from what I read and clear. It was nice to step outside of hazy Beijing to see the Chinese countryside. Mark and I still have not been able to determine if the haze is a fog from all the humidity, or if it is due to typical L.A. style smog. Once we got to the base of the mountain where the Wall runs, we decided to pay about $7 extra to take a chairlift style lift to the base of the Wall. This $7 also included a tabaggon ride down the mountain, instead of taking the chairlift down. Imaging a luge in the Olympics, only we were sitting on a plastic cart with wheels that rolled down a metal tube. It was pretty fun and had a lot of potential, except for the lady in front of us that completely slowed us down and created a bottleneck. I guess the her Chinese driving skills came into play there. Anyways, Mark and I spent a good 2 hours climbing the Wall, hiking to and from different lookout towers. The Wall is massive, and I was much more impressed than I thought I would be. I knew it would be amazing, but I guess I figured I would lose interest after about 20 minutes of being on it. I didn't! I will try to post pictures as sson as possible, but at the moment I can't get the blog to work other than post messages. Everything except for the text box I am typing in is in Chineses! I had to guess which characters to click on to get it to work yesterday. Hopefully when I get to Shanghai I will figure it out. By the way, Mark and I booked our hostel in Shanghai yesterday. It's brand new in the center of town and it is only costing us $1.07 a night. Dont worry, we saw pictures and it received good reviews from other travelers. We are pretty much able to get by on less than $20 a day easily. Food will fill us up for less than $5. We splurged and went out for Peking duck last night and it was less than $10 a person. It was pretty oily, but moist, with a crispy golden skin. We wrapped it in a tortilla style pancake and dipped it in plum sauce. Tonight we may try to find a Western July 4th party and tomorrow we wil hit up the Olympic center.