The Great Wall of China

Hello Everyone!

One of the Seven Wonders of the World! The Great Wall.
We went to the Great Wall while we were visiting Beijing. It's only about an hour and a half north of the city.

Xiaolong got a little hot dog on a stick!

There are many entrances to get on the wall and we stopped at one of the most popular and developed sites at Badaling. Before we walked up the wall we got some snacks in the little shopping areas a little down the mountain.

Our tickets and the Badaling Entrance!
I know it's summer but it's a little chilly up in the mountains.

Yay! Inside the gate. Look at the mountains!
The smog makes it so hard to see.
Look how many people!

 Now we get to walk up to the top of the wall.

This is exciting! 

This is one of the watch towers on the wall.
The little windows were fun to look out and see the wilderness!

Look how STEEP this is! Those walkways and steps are no joke.

My advice be careful and hold the hand rail!

AH! Don't Fall! Lol

Beautiful Views 

People carved their names in the wall!
I wonder how old some of those are.

Looking over the world.

Signs are hilarious!

Commit No Nuisance.

This is from the inside of one of the towers. 

Awesome frame!

We are so high up!
Actually, about this time in the tour, I got asked by a Chinese couple to take a picture with them. Haha!

This is the very top of the tower. We weren't allowed to go any farther down the wall but had to get back down. 

As a final treat, Here is a video we took of coming back down the mountain! It's a little silly... but I guess it's funny.

Shanxi Museum in Taiyuan

Hello Everyone!

Before I posted more pictures today, I wanted to just give a map of China, Shanxi, and Taiyuan to kind of show where were spent most of out time!

So, Shanxi is one of the provinces(states) of China towards the north east. The translation of 'Shanxi' is Mountain West or The West of the Mountain. The image on the right is of Shanxi and the highlighted yellow is of the capital city Taiyuan. The translation of 'Taiyuan' means Great Plains. Taiyuan is a city of industry, producing the majority of coal in all of China. They are also home to the largest steel company in all of Asia.
Taiyuan makes the best vinegar in the country and some of the best noodles!

One of the 'touristy' places we visited in Taiyuan is the Shanxi Museum. I'll post a few pictures of the outside and some of the cooler things inside, only if you want to see more comment below and I will make a post just with those pictures! I don't want to bore you too much! haha.

This is the outside of the museum and its shaped like an upside down pyramid! Lol

The side of the walkway had a few pillars on the way to the entrance.

This was on their temporary display. It is a headpiece for on of the indigenous tribes of China.

This is a centuries old bowl for food! It is also one of the first bowls to have been decorated with paint!

This little piggy looks really cute! Its secret is that it will hold your wine for you!

This is a set of Chinese bells. Yes, a musical instrument. It had little dots all over it to give it that unique Chinese bell sound.

This painting is of the misty mountains in Shanxi. Done with ink and lots of water. 

If you can believe this, I will tell you this is an ancient pillow. The Chinese used these ceramic pillows to keep their head off the ground at night

These are some of the earliest painted bowls using multiple colors. Most other pottery used only one color.

This piece is such a pretty blue color. If you notice on the bottom there are only three legs. This was seen as the most stable leg formation.

This bowl was one of my favorites. Its very simple white but on the sides there are little orange goldfish painted on the sides. There was a mirror set up for us to see the bottom stamp, proof it was made in China.

The next few pictures are figures, bottles, and cups made from some of the finest jade in China. These pieces took long hours to craft and are really amazing to look at the detail!

I hope you enjoyed these pictures and some of my stories! I will post more on Sunday!

Traveling International

Hello Everyone!

I wanted to share some more of the plane we took to Narita and the meals we had in flight!
Should have posted these before but I just now got everything organized and can give a better timeline! :)

This is the inside of the plan and about where we were sitting. Our seats had a little TV where we could watch any movie or show they had on there.

This is our first in flight meal! We got a choice of curry or beef. I chose curry! We also got sushi, salad, bread, crackers and cheese, and a brownie. The drink I ordered was ginger ale. It was actually pretty good, except the bread was really hard. I think because they keep it in the fridge.

From the personal TVs we had, you can see the flight path and how was we are from Narita. Here we are just passing Alaska!

I wanted to see the view out of the plane, so here it is. I thought it was going to be of the ocean! But we are definitely too high up to see anything. It was beautiful all the same! (and the window is a bit dirty :p)

This is our second meal on the flight! much less than the other but we were almost to Narita. We got chicken rice and pineapple and strawberry. The fruit was really refreshing.













These next two pictures just show how close we were to Japan and the altitude, ground speed and outside air temperature.

Can you believe how high we are! And that its absolutely freezing outside! -67 degrees lol.

 The Airplane was really cold, too. I had the worst time trying to fall asleep on there that I was just completely exhausted when we landed in Japan. 

After we got off the plane we had to go immediately go through Japanese customs. So, on top of being extremely tired I had to make myself stay awake and you can't sit down during this part. It took about 30 minutes to get through the line and get into the Narita Airport.



Xiaolong was hungry, so we went to a little shop next to our terminal to get a bite to eat. This is soba noodles with fried tofu skin. It was just delicious!

Xiaolong was waiting for his beef rice to arrive~ hehe. Mine was faster!

This is the Inside of the little store we got food.

The lady there is making our delicious lunch!

We actually had trouble ordering because we both don't speak Japanese Lol.

Hope you enjoyed it!