First 36 hours in Beijing!

Sorry for the delay!  I wasn't smart enough to set up my blogsplot workaround before I left for China, but here's what's been going on.  First, my awesome uncle Scott, the one who got me the flight pass, just so happened to be flying through Newark the morning of my flight to Beijing so we got breakfast and he saw me off.  The flight was totally fine, lots of sleep and movie watching - I didn't quite know what to do with myself without my work email and an endless to do Iist.  It was also lucky that I made it out - apparently ~20 minutes after my flight took off, my uncle said that they closed down Newark for the next half day because they discovered a crack in the runway.

So I arrived in Beijing on Tuesday afternoon and made my way to the hostel.  Even though I was exhausted, I went to the outdoor food market (like Chinese schmorgasburg for my New Yorkers) with 4 Europeans from my hostel where there was a huge assortment of delicious eats from things like mushu
pork and dumplings to super bizarre foods like starfish, pigeon and scorpion.  We also walked to see Tiananmen Square which is actually way cooler at night because it's a massive lit up picture of Mao Zedong!

One of the night market vendors

The next morning, I woke up early for my Great Wall hike - my primary motivation for coming to Beijing.  The Great Wall is actually not that close to the city- it ended up being a 3 hour drive from my hostel.  Of course, I had been chugging water all morning to prep for the hike.  Turns out Chinese highways don't have rest stops, instead, the dudes just get out and pee on the side of the highway.  Awesome.  While I assured my guide that I could manage with some of the small shrubbery by the side of the road, I think they were mildly appalled by the idea so we stopped off at one of the more rural farming communities so if could use their public facilities.

Now onto the real fun - when I was planning my Great Wall hike, I obviously chose the most aggressive version possible to maximize my "fitness."  I don't know if it was the snake I had eaten the prior night, the fact that my body thought it was supposed to be sleeping or a whole host of other excuses, but it kicked my butt.   The Great Wall is incredibly hilly with ups and downs on steep stairways and oftentimes quite narrow paths.  I'm so glad I chose the hike I did because it was on a much less popular part of the wall.  What that meant is that we saw no one else out there that day and most of wall had not be restored for tourist use.

The farmer's house where we started our hike

Just climbin' some big stairs!

Later that night, I was planning on eating a small dinner and going to bed early but I ended up going out for dinner and beers with one of my fellow countrymen (aka another tall blond Scandinavian guy) from the hostel who insisted on paying for everything because he needed to use up all of his yen before he left the next day.  Not a bad start to the trip...