Saturday The Great Wall & Olympic Park

Today we visited the Great Wall of China.  We drove with our guide for the day Nancy and a friend of hers from France to the Great Wall.  It is located 64 km outside of Beijing.  They say outside but Beijing goes almost all the way there-there are 20 million people in this city alone.  The Great Wall is built in the mountains and you can see bits and pieces all along the drive there, most of it has fallen apart. The original part was built in 700 BC.  It was around 30 degrees in Beijing but it was around 5 degrees at the Great Wall.  We dressed warm but with windchill I'm sure it was well below zero-even so we made it to the fourth fort up the line. Nancy said it was too cold for her so she waited at the bottom at the KFC (yes there is a KFC at the great wall-it used to be a starbucks).  After we left the Great Wall we drove to The BIrd's Nest where the Olympics were held.  Now it is used for indoor recreation, concerts and indoor skiing. Then Nancy took us to one of her favorite restaruants where we had a little of everything:Peking Duck(not at all what I was thinking it was, I imagined a duck on a platter it really is slices of slow roasted duck in a crepe like shell with some sort of sauce-actually pretty good, Matthew liked it too), Kung Pow chicken without the spice, garlic brocolli, some sort of deep fried pork and rice.  It was all delicious-She had them bring a fork for Matthew and me, just couldn't  pick up any food with those darn sticks.  Then we exchanged money, paid for our airline tickets to Nanjing for tomorrow and went back to our room.  Matthew was going to swim, but they require a swim cap-who brings one of those? We are all exhausted so we are off to watch a movie & relax.