Great Wall and Modern Beijing

*Image heavy post

We were up early the next day since we'll be going to The Great Wall and travel time is about two hours. You can go to different parts of the wall but we all decided on Mutianyu since the cable car and the slide are there. We also read that the place is not as packed.

The hotel got the cabs for us, we negotiated a price, I don't remember how much but it was pretty cheap for a two-way trip, at the very least we will have transportation readily available when we're beat.

There are two companies selling tickets to the cable cars which got us a bit confused.

As it turns out, there are two ways to get to the Great Wall, by cable car or by sky ride (which they also call the cable car). They go in different directions but since the operators of the sky ride also operates the slide, we opted for the sky ride.

It was the perfect day to be there. The weather was great and there were not a lot of people. We walked the length of the Great Wall until we were too tired to take another step forward. The walk back to where we first started sure is hard. It was the first and only time, I sweated like crazy and took my jackets off in Beijing.

We had lunch at a forgettable place our cabbies took us to. After that, we requested that they drop us off at the Bird's Nest instead of the hotel but they were asking for 100RMB (660 pesos) more. We freshened up at the hotel for about an hour before heading back out.

Upon exiting the MRT, the bird's nest and the cube greet you. We all went our own ways taking lots of pictures before finally meeting up at the far end.

We then bought souvenirs from the sidewalk vendors and it was quite interesting because as they were preparing the things that we wanted, a group of police officers approached the vendors, I got scared a bit but the officers were nice. They waited for the vendors to finish their business before asking them to scoot. One officer even held the huge bag of souvenirs of the vendor.

We were also surprised when one vendor caught up with us and insisted she replace one souvenir that we bought that was not working. We were telling her that it was okay but she was really insistent. She wanted us to come with her but we didn't want to. She ran all the way to where they were hiding their stuff and gave us a spanking brand new souvenir.

Nicole recommended that we try Bellagio for late night desserts so we headed there since we haven't had dinner yet. Good thing there were Chinese characters on the website so we had no difficulty asking the cab drivers where to go.

Food was very good and the desserts even if it was already freezing cold outside seemed way too good to pass up.

Cabs were almost non-existent so we had no choice but to walk all the way to the MRT. We didn't know where it was so we got slightly lost but thankfully we were able to find it after a while. Thankfully, the trains were no longer crowded since we were all really tired.