Great Wall trek and the hostle

9/12
What an amazing day! The trek on the Great Wall was absolutely incredible (the pics do not do justice)! It was so surreal (like I have said), the wall just goes on and on as far as the eye can see in both directions. I started my third project by taking a bunch of pictures of sunrise to the afternoon. I plan on making a time-lapse video out of it.
We woke up at around 5:30am but I’ve never been so awake with so little sleep. Our groups energy was awesome. It was so inspiring that Ying’s husband David (whose a little bit more heavyset) decided he would join the group on the 5 mile (or 7.5km to be exact) hike on some sketchy parts of the Great Wall.
The hike flew by so quickly even though it took us about 3 – 3.5 hours. I’ll tell much more about the wall if you ever ask me.
I was in the first of a few groups to reach the final tower of our hike (we went from tower 4 where we slept to tower 30). We waited and haggled a bit with the merchants waiting for tourists. It wasn’t too long for everyone to meet up and we started to head for lunch (we were STARVED!). We heard there was a cable car to take us down but we all didn’t want to pay for it. Then as I walked by it I realized it was a zip line. Instantly I was in and most of the group followed. It was only 35 yuan (a little over $4) and it was so much fun. It zipped us from next to the Great Wall down over a river to the base where we took a boat from there to get to where we would eat lunch.
We ate our fill as usual then headed out (and slept on the ride home, it felt like it should have been night). Two hours later we were back in Beijing and we headed over to our hostel. We all expected it to be shady but it turned out to be the living arrangement favorite. It was like a small community area. Our group took up most of the rooms but there were ironically a guy who was doing graduate school at U of Washington. There were also two girls traveling together, one had gone to George Fox in Oregon the other somewhere in Portland. Small world! And Andy (Washington guy) said that a few days before our arrival some Duck graduates had stayed there as well. Must be a popular place for people of the Northwest even though Ying had just randomly run into the site for it on the net.
There were also a mother cat, two kittens and a turtle for pets crawling around the area and letting themselves into our rooms which was really cool.