"The Great Wall is long" and other obvious statements

You can pretend that's mist in the background if you like. Mm, air quality.

Apparently there are cushier segments of wall you can visit, but we at HBA went to the section at Simatai, about 2 hours away by bus (read: +4 hours of total sleep time, heck yes). Climbing up was tiring and down was scary, but all in all, great fun. I got my picture taken with a little Chinese girl at her mother's request, found my Chinese name carved into the wall (obviously by invading Mongols) and mustered up enough will-power to not buy extremely overpriced ice cream. All around success.

We were all a little jealous of that hang-glider-thingy.

Saturday night we went out to Houhai, which as our textbook promised was quite lively. There was one bar after another along the edge of the lake. And big red lanterns shining. The accuracy of this particular chapter of our book makes me wonder if Dawei's dysentery in chapter 7 actually is a legitimate concern. Hm...

Our new Chinese friends are in the background.

We wandered around the lake awhile and ended up at a surprisingly fun club, where we had fun dancing with the locals to American music. I think Chinese people are much more polite about personal space while dancing, which I appreciate.

Big something in the museum entrance. We climbed up it only to find whatever was up there was closed.

On Sunday I met up with my Chinese mom and sister and two of my sister's friends, and we all went to the Capital Museum, which was a nice history museum of Beijing specifically and China as a whole. It was overall very nice and modern, but rather shoddy at some parts in a way that I can't really describe, but strikes me as sort of symbolic of China's rapid modernization. The room with a great wall exhibit, for example, had a reconstructed side of the wall, which you peered over and saw...nothing. Some fake dirt and a rock or two. Awesome.

One of the cooler parts of the museum was how they had a running time line of Western history that correlated with the artifacts from Chinese history. My sense of history is...not the greatest, and I realized I had always assumed that the coolest parts of each country's history all happened at the same time, like one big era of badassery with pirates and ninjas and kings and queens (and dinosaurs and cavemen and astronauts...) and all that. Ok, so maybe I was somewhat more informed, but I didn't realize how recent a long of the things I was seeing were.

My host sister and her friend. Er, maybe not her friend. I never really figured out the connection there. All I know is she was rarely included in our pictures.

A good part of our museum trip consisted of taking pictures. My host sister had a really nice camera with an extra large lens in addition to her small pocket camera. My host mom had another. I think all together we had more cameras then people. Actually, I'm sure of it. My favorite by far were the fake candid pictures where we stood in front of the glass looking interested. I'm pretty sure I'm cracking up in all of them, it was so ridiculous.

After the museum, we went to a mall and waited in the Nike Kids store for my host sister to exchange some shoes, which took a surprisingly long time, then we went to a restaurant and I was forced to eat until far past the point of physical discomfort. Literally after everyone was saying they were full, my host mother ordered 3 more dishes. I didn't want to eat lunch today; I was still not hungry.

Well, onto week three.