Hello
everyone!
Adjusting wasn't so bad this morning. We all got up and ate breakfast around
7. It was good and we tried some new things. We didn't know quite what we were
eating, but we enjoyed it. We then got on the bus and headed out to the Great
Wall. The bus trip took about one and a half hours. It was an interesting ride.
When we finally got out, we took a cable car up to the Wall. After taking pictures
we got to hiking. A few people (Kai, Oliver, Drummond, and I) decided
to go ahead and get to the farthest we could in the allotted time. We got to
the highest point and we must've climbed what it felt like 500 steps. We then
headed back to a spot on the wall, which gave us a chance to take the alpine
slide
down. It was a lot of fun and cooled us off.
After lunch we went to a secondary school. We were
given a nice tour around the campus and learned some history about the school
which was a temple over 300 years old. We then met up with a bunch of school
students and we had a good time exchanging information about each other. They
had really
good English and were very nice. We then went back to the hotel to prepare for
dinner.
We are all pretty tuckered out from the jet lag and the day's adventure. Hopefully
the extra hour of sleep we are getting will be good for us.
Signing out and good-bye from the Imperial Pod
Jesse Bob
Ms.
Sopper has some thoughts on the first few days as well,
read them here.
Left
- This view allows you to see how the wall follows the
steep and windy ridge
line. Above - on top of a guard tower.
Jesse, today's author, strolls down a Great Wall side
path
Down they go!
Fruits and nuts for sale at the base of the Wall
Robotics Class at the high school
Our
whole group plus some teachers and students from
Niu Lan Xhan High School standing in front of the new part of the school.
Ms.
Sopper's Impressions:
The flight was long. I tried not to look
at the watch for as long as possible. When I first broke
down and looked only three hours had passed. Long flight.
We flew over Alaska and Siberia. What was incredible
about Alaska is that it was so white and reflective it
was difficult to get any sense of altitude. It seemed
we were skipping right above the surface of the earth.
Saw just vast expanses of snow and ice with what appeared
to be icebergs and a few rivers. Saw only this for a
long time. This, according to the plane icon on the screen
in front, was flying over Anchorage. Siberia was more
snow, more mountains and what appeared to be canyons
and snaking rivers of ice. It did not look like a hospitable
place.
Getting off the plane in Beijing was the best. Walking out into the Beijing air
was fabulous. It was about 60 degrees and a light cool breeze. This New Jersey
boy smelled the air and hummed with pleasure. It was ticklishly delightful watching
and listening to these Vermont kids take in the first sights of China. First
they were stunned by the color and size of the billboards and noted that all
the advertising wasn't directed at them. They almost immediately were struck
by the variety and novelty of the cars on the road. Students hadn't expected
to see the new lines, the tinted windows, essentially, the wealth and access.
We're staying at the Yanxiang
Hotel. Kids settle in. Electricity and plumbing
are figured out. Clothes are changed. We had a fantastic dinner around the corner
and down the block. I could spend the next three weeks exploring that menu alone.
Our first day went very well. The group has a good feeling; students are getting
along and supporting one another. Where they can manage to get the hackysack
out and kick it around turns out to be anywhere. They are having fun and learning
about China and traveling and taking it all in with great humor and the spirit
of adventure.
This morning we climbed, many
ran, up The Great Wall and then slid down. The drive
in was almost
equally interesting
with the street action, signage, and scenery, but nothing
could have prepared us for The Great Wall. Having been
forewarned, we kept our shopping to a minimum and hiked
up to the cable car and flew the rest of the way. Most
of our group strolled leisurely up to, but not including,
the very steep part. An intrepid few made it all the way
to the end and back. We admired the terraced landscape
and climbed to the top of towers and took in the vastness
of the Wall and the countryside.
No photographs can prepare
you for the sheer enormity of this undertaking. We had
plenty of bottled water and carried only ourselves and
our cameras and still felt the adventure in our joints
and muscles. How all this material and manpower was mobilized
to build this truly Great Wall was a question with which
many of us left. And leaving was nothing like the way up.
We took sleds back to the base. It was great fun. Some
of us got some practice in bargain-shopping, all of us
got a great deal of practice in stairs.
After another magnificent meal, we headed for our first
school visit. Niu Lan Xhan High School is a state-of-the-art
high school built on the site of, and utilizing the old
buildings of, a Ming era temple. Among our tour guides
was a woman who had gone to middle and high school there
and
has taught English at the high school for the last twenty
years. She clearly had enormous affection and pride for
the school and it was easy to see why. We visited the physics
classroom and observed students working on making robots.
In the biology classroom we saw student work in preserving
animals for an impressive museum on the same floor. We
were shown through the girls' dormitory where the students
live six to a room in perfect tidiness and amid sweet and
personal decorative touches. After our tour of the campus,
we were joined by sixteen Chinese students whom our
students met with in small groups. They fell immediately
to comparing notes on high school, movies, sports,
music,
and all aspects of life. Many expressed interest in visiting
the US which we could not encourage strongly enough.
By the end of the day, students were struggling with competing
and equally strong desires: to figure out the phone card
and make contact with home or to succumb to exhaustion
and grab one more hour of precious sleep. By the time of
this writing, all are tucked in and getting recharged for
another busy day in Beijing.
