The Great Wall, P amd Senorita Vita

Steve and I have spent the last 4 days in Bejing and are loving it. We have decided to extend our visit here by 2 more days. We have been hanging out with Cheddar Ben's brother, P and his lovely girlfriend Senorita V (they chose their code names) and they have been taking us to delicious restaurants across the city. Last night, we went to this amazing dumpling restaurant where, in addition to our veggie dumplings, we got pork and shrimp, crab leg meat and pork in hot oil. Unbelievable! We are obsessed with the dumplings here and we have been getting them almost every day.
One of our most memorable experiences has been our trip to the Great Wall, which would not have been possible without P. We all got on a public bus for an hour to transfer to another bus but, when we arrived at our transfer point, we were told the second bus not longer ran. P negotiated for a driver to take us to the wall, wait for us for 3 hours and take us back to the bus stop for the equivalent of 12 dollars. Although I have seen hundreds of pictures of the Great Wall, it is quite another thing to see it in person. It is huge and built on the ridges of the mountains so there are spectacular views from every direction. We hiked on a cloudy day so it felt very mystical. We walked through an overgrown section of the wall that has not been upkept and that many people don't walk through. We walked through parts of the wall where half of it had collapsed and where the whole walkway was covered in weeds and flowers. We were the only ones on this part of the wall and had to crawl under spiderwebs and got lots of little scratches on our legs from the weeds- but it was worth every second. A funny way to end our walking over a 400-year old wall was to take a toboggan down to the bottom of the mountain. It is raining today so we are not yet sure of our itinerary but we head to Datong in the Shanxi province in 2 days. We have booked the cheapest tickets on a local train- we have heard that the seats are hard, uncomfortable and we will be traveling with lots of locals who might offer us some rice wine along the journey.

Beijing