Oktoberfest and China Part II

Before I continue to update on our China trip, I thought I'd just share a fun story about Oktoberfest. Chris participated in not one, but two competitions! One was eating and drinking, and one was a tag-team Erdinger drinking competition, more of a marathon than a sprint. Chris and 3 of our friends were victorious and won us free drinks for the rest of the night and an Erdinger "Oktoberfest" set, complete with 2 glasses, 4 beers and coupons for free things around Singapore. Here are photos of the victorious group before and after their win!






Now...Onto China...

After a restful day/night at the Simatai Guesthouse, we moved on to hike the portion of the Wall between Simatai and Jinshanling, about 5 km. We had been told by several people that it is difficult and steep at the beginning of the hike and then it calms down, but I didn't get that at all! I felt like I was climbing up stairs and downstairs, and upstairs and downstairs, and...you get the idea. For about 5 hours. It was fun though, and the views were beautiful. I did feel a bit dumb though - we brought Chris' daypack and left our other bags in the car. However, we didn't really measure out how much that would hold, versus what we wanted to bring with us. It ended up that I had to carry a shopping bag (brought from home, but it happened to be a Duty Free bag) on our whole hike - I got some weird looks for that!

This is the scary bridge he had to cross to start our day:



and some of the ups and downs...



We had alot of people following us, trying to get us to buy 'beer, soda, water, postcard, t-shirt?' - all said in rapid succession. But, being used to hawkers from our time in Turkey, we were able to shake them off pretty easily. We had been told that we'd find our next host through his wife, who'd have my name taped up to her stall of 'beer, water, etc...' and we were very unsure about whether or not this was actually going to work out. But sure enough, we walked into the nicest, most 'together' tower we'd seen that day, and there is a woman, smiling like crazy, with my name on her table.






She served us tea, on our 'terrace' where we hung out for the afternoon, looking at the wall in all directions.

Eventually, her husband arrived, at just about sunset, and walked us into town to his home/shop/restaurant for a fabulous dinner!

Some shots from dinner:





After the humongous dinner (including, among many other things, a plate of dumplings for each person!) we took the 20 minute walk by flashlight back up to the watchtower, shared a bottle of wine on our new friends' watchtower and took our walk home along the wall to our home, where Mr. Sun had set up our beds for us and we went to sleep to get up at 6am for sunrise.

After seeing the beautiful sunrise, we walked down to meet our driver to take us into Beijing. We got stuck in a ton of traffic on the way home, but had some time to relax before starting on our whirlwind tour of Bejing and Xi'an...to come...