Excursions outside the city

THE GREAT WALL & CHENGDE WITH 100 OTHER STUDENTS
4 buses of 30 people each, we travel to a non-touristy part of the Great Wall.  We are dropped off at Simatai and hike to the next town, 6 miles away. The hike is very intense - no one is expecting how tough it'll be.  We climb and drop steep mountain ridges, millions of steps in various stages of decay provide unsure footing.

The sun is hot and a few consider going back. So we trudge onwards, the desperate among us buying overpriced bottled water that the chinese have carted up here.

The views are impressive - the Great Wall winding along endless valleys, providing relief to the vast green countryside. The engineers of the Great Wall managed to build to the top of every peak, no matter how steep and inaccesible it might be. Although it is very impressive to look at, when it comes time to climb the vertical stone steps in the midday sun, we wonder at the crazy ambitions which drove this project.

On the 2nd day we stayed in a village, a very odd experience.  This was the attempt to give students a 'genuine' view of village life, but pre-packaging such an experience is clearly a lost cause.  The village and inhabitants were choreographed to carry out our stay, which basically centered on eating food.

We had three meals at the village: lunch, dinner, then the following morning breakfast, each in a different household. Each time the hosts piled a ton of food in our face (which is standard chinese custom) but strangely enough, all three meals were exactly the same. We had sugar tomatos, fried chicken, and hard boiled eggs for all three meals, all heavily laden in MSG flavoring. Everything had been bought in bulk, and by the time breakfast came along no one even wanted to look at the piles of food we were supposed to eat.
 
After the village, we went to the old imperial town of Chengde, surrounded by wonderful mountains.  I was grossly tired of our tourist excursions, so I tried to escape from the group as much as possible. The tour guides would go up to the famous temple and I'd slink off to the corner, then strike up conversation with random Chinese. 

They are exceedingly friendly, and will talk for 2 hours about the most basic things (the limitation of my language skills).  There are so few foreigners, and even fewer who actually speak Mandarin, that the novelty of connecting with a "white devil" is an exciting opportunity. I pull out my language textbooks, and a half dozen Chinese will huddle around and try to help me. They have absolutely no sense of privacy, but this only speeds my learning process, as I often have to deal with small crowds asking questions, laughing, watching. Occasionally I feel exhausted but just keep going, speaking this funny tongue of theirs.