This Christmas was a different kind of Christmas for sure. I wasn't able to be home for Christmas so my friend Brandon and I decided to spend Christmas in Beijing.
I just have to add this side note in that it is very weird to be in a place that does not celebrate Christmas. It is hard to get excited about Christmas because there is no Christmas buzz. No last min. shopping. No children giddy because of Santa coming. No elf on the shelf. There are Christmas decorations everywhere and Christmas trees everywhere but they seemed to have missed the concept of Christmas. To them it is a fun Foreigner holiday that they can decorate for and that is about it.
It was a busy two days but it was well worth it. We went to Forbidden City. That was an interesting experience. It is fun to be able to say I did it but like many people told me it isn't really anything too special.
I think that some of the reason it is so famous is because people that are visiting China get to see real Chinese architecture. It is very pretty and very cool to see but it is very much like a temple or any other Chinese architecture.
Christmas night we went back to the area and took photos it was really neat to see at night too.
Beijing is very very cold right now. It stays well below freezing all the time. It was neat to see snow and ice everywhere. We decided for Christmas dinner we would eat Burger King because it was there and because I wanted to eat something a little more American.
The next day we went to the Great Wall. This is where the real adventure began. My friend Brandon is a bit of an adventurer he likes to try to find off the beaten path places to go...so he decided that we just had to go to this one part of the wall that not many tourist go to and then we could walk over to the tourist spot. I agreed to this not knowing what I had just gotten myself into. By agreeing to this it meant that I got to walk up a mountain for the better part of three hours that was covered in Ice and snow all the while wearing the wrong shoes and slipping every five seconds spending most of the three hours either on my butt or on my stomach. Brandon wearing some cheap shoes was completely fine and didn't slip once. We finally get to the top of the mountain and to the wall...brandon only surviving my annoyance and anger from falling up the mountain because I couldn't catch him. We finally get to the top and what do we find tourist that had walked over to this spot....less than excited to see tourist at this point seeing as we skipped the cable cars and walked up a mountain to this super secret spot only to find tourist....I asked out of curiousty where they had gotten on the Great Wall at. well low and behold they had used the cable cars and walked over from 8 watch towers over....had I not slipped five seconds after I tried to kill Brandon he would have been dead for making me climb the ice covered mountain.
Well we started climbing the stairs and the Great Wall to get to the highest point and everything on the Great Wall was covered in Ice. It was the scariest few hours of my life cause I kept thinking I was gonna slip down really steep stairs. We made it to the top and the view was beautiful. We then realized sun was setting and we had to get off the Great Wall before the chair lift closed. We barely made it slipping and sliding the whole way down on the ice covered wall but we made it last people off the wall and managed not to kill each other the whole trip :)
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