The Great Wall!

The next morning we went and visited an international Kung-Fu School. They put on a performance for us where they broke glass using their heads, smashed big sticks in half and kicked each other. Then they had picture time and if you know me at all you know that I:
A.      Never get up on stage
B.      NEVER Get my picture taken with people on stage
C.      NEVER Act like a kung-fu person in a picture on a stage
D.      But I am happy to watch other people do A-C on stage.
So I stood and watched from the audience. Then they taught us some moves…again, I just watched because I don’t need to learn kung fu. I was watching friends attempt Kung Fu moves when I suddenly noticed a bunch of little kids outside. I walked outside and all these little kids that were between ages 3-9 years old were learning kung fu. They were SO cute! ADORABLE! This one little kid (who I wanted to take home) was about three and he didn’t really want to learn kung-fu or be out in the freezing cold and he was trying so hard and trying not to cry. His dad was amazing at kung-fu and was trying to help him along. I was a huge help to this little kid (I am sure) as I took pictures and video of him and was cheering him on as he tried to do the splits. I wished that I had been able to speak fluent Chinese to tell him that I am 21 and still can’t do the splits so not to worry about it. I also wished I could have told him how proud I was that he was sticking with it—since I would have gotten up and said no way—I want to go inside and play with my toys. He was precious. SO CUTE! I watched them for about an hour and we left they were still practicing! Then we drove the rest of the way to the Great Wall! The Great Wall is called “the long wall of Ten Thousand Li.” However, the Great Wall is way better than great and so I think it should be called the freaking amazing, incredible totally cool wall! FYI: It took more than 300,000 men and 10 years to complete. I didn’t know that there were so many stairs and so I was surprised by how much uphill and downhill there was and you can trip and kill yourself if your not careful! I made sure not to trip. Don’t trip on your trip. That is the motto. I do think that there should be a race on the wall! I think that would be awesome—an ultra marathon! We took a tram to one of the sections and got to walk along the wall for about an hour. It was so amazing! We had a photo shoot and took a million trillion pictures! We got to watch the sunset and then we got coco and made our way back to Beijing. We had a HUGE meal with all kinds of rice, chicken, beef, and pot stickers, hot and sour soup, egg soup, rice cakes, spring rolls, egg rolls, fruit! It was so yummy! Then we went to an Acrobatic show. They had live birds that flew all around and it probably had a theme, but it was all in Chinese so who knows?!? The acrobats climbed up on a stack of 10 chairs and then did hand stands (I can do that), made a pyramid with a trillion people (no big deal), balanced on bicycles (easy), jumped through hoops and were bendable in all directions (anyone can do that). It was impressive. I am not a huge acrobat fan, but this was cool. It was similar to Cirque de Soule (yup, spelled that wrong) and then we headed back to the hotel for the night.