I had purchased a 3 day tour seeing the highlights in Beijing. The first day included visiting a jade factory/store, Ming tomb, lunch, great wall, and a tea ceremony.
I didn’t get many pictures of the places we went at first and we weren’t allowed to take pictures in the tomb. Outside the tomb there was a huge entryway at the front but you were suppose to walk around it to enter and walk through it on the way out. The chinese believe in balance with everything relating to the ying and yang. So on one side of the gate was the living and on the other side with the tombs was the dead. Before exiting through the gate you had to wipe off any spirits that might’ve attached to you and while walking through you had to yell ” wou way lie le”- meaning “I’m back”.
The scenery just getting places was amazing.
We had an amazing lunch at a restaurant at the bottom of the hill where the great wall was.
The section of the wall that I climbed was called “Mutianyu”. It’s one of the better sections of the wall with an amazing view. We had two hours of free time to go on the wall and you could either walk for 1 hour just to get to the great wall or you could get a cable car up. I took the cable car up and it brought me to section 15. Section 20 was the highest point so that’s where I headed. I met some nice people on the tour so I stuck with them for awhile to climb up. It took an hour to get up from 15-20(only 5 sections). We all thought we wouldn’t make it but we did. And I swear the last stair case was so steep on purpose so people would give up.
The view was undescribably beautiful. I felt so accomplished getting up there and amazed with everything I was taking in with my eyes. I thought Beijing would be colder since it’s north of Suzhou but it was a really nice warm day. So by the end it was really hot since I dressed for the cold.
At the bottom there was the cutest dog and it reminded me of all my animals I miss back home.
The tea ceremony was very nice. We got to try a few types of tea that help the body in different ways. The Chinese are very serious about their tea, it’s so popular and natural to always have tea that the water fountains have a hot or cold water function. The most interesting tea she showed us, in my opinion, was the fruit tea that you could actually eat the fruit after or reuse it.
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