"The other Great Wall in China is the Great Wall of Cars"

This morning we left for the Badaling section of the Great Wall. This section is the most touristy and easiest to climb.

We hit the usual traffic heading out of Beijing and then things started to clear up. Well no traffic at all was too good to be true. We were literally in stand still traffic. As I said before, if you don't NEED to travel during the October holiday in China... don't. You're better off staying in. Everybody in China seemed to be headed to the Great Wall today. I figured they had all seen it already, why do they need to go again? Wrong. My dad came up with the clever saying, "The other Great Wall in China is the Great Wall of Cars". Our tour guide didn't seem to understand that joke.

Before walking up, all smiles!

Our 2.5 hour car ride with traffic turned into 4.5 hours. AND we ended up going to the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall. It's the closest section to Beijing. If we had gone to the Badaling section it would have taken another 6 hours. No thank you. People were getting out of the cars and going to the bathroom on the road. Some were just walking up ahead of their car so they could get out and walk. It was honestly the most insane thing I have ever seen. You haven't seen bad traffic until you have come to Beijing. I literally thought I was going to pee in my pants. And there was no way I was going to get out of the van and pee in the street.

When we finally arrived to the Juyongguan section Mom and I sprinted to the bathroom. I don't even think you can call the bathroom we went to a bathroom. It was flooded, with who knows what, there was "dirt" everywhere. The doors didn't lock. It smelt terrible, even the chinese ladies were holding their noses and gagging. Worst experience of my life.

We met our tour guide at the ticket booth and she gave us our tickets and we entered this section of the Great Wall. It wasn't until we looked up at the 70 degree incline when our tour guide decided to tell us that she has never taken a group of tourists to this section. GREAT... we are going to die.

After conversing, we decided that we had to give it a shot. We didn't just sit in traffic for 4.5 hours to look at the steepest section of the Great Wall. So we did, and eventually we made it to the top. And let me tell you, it was quiet the accomplishment when we made it up.  The view from the top was worth the almost death, trip up.

They made it down!

Getting down, that was a different story. But we made it!

We got back from the Great Wall around 3pm and got lunch in the hotel. I had my first cheese burger in a month. It was delicious.

View from the Atmosphere Bar

Then we relaxed for awhile until 7ish. Had cocktails and went to dinner around 8:30pm. We went to the restaurant called Three Guizhou Men. It was authentic Chinese food and nobody spoke english. So, I used as much Chinese as I could to order our food. We ordered way too many dishes. The best dish was this pulled pork with peanuts. It's as close as i'll get to southern pulled pork for awhile. It was extremely spicy though, but I still loved it. Definitely going back there! After dinner we went to the Atmosphere Bar. Its on the 60th floor of the tallest building in Beijing. From there you can see pretty much all of Beijing. I guess, I don't really know. But it was really cool. The drinks were pretty expensive though and they only had one cigar on the menu for $800... yes, American dollars. Crazy!