Got up at 6:30 – woken up by Matt getting up. he said that the chickens had woken him up.
We stood around somewhat awkwardly until breakfast was ready. I took some photos of the house, we walked up onto the roof to look at the village in the morning, and helped feed wood into the wok for breakfast.
The food was baozi, egg fried bread, potatoes (almost like hash browns, but not), porridge.
After breakfast we walked past the wedding setup to the basketball court, with the host brother. He’s on the basketball team at his school (although it sounds like so are most people. His highschool as I understand it: 2000 people, 3 grades (in china 3years junior high, 3 years high school (optional, about 1/10 of students continue here.)) Each grade has 8 sections with about 40 people in them (it doesn’t add up, I know.) each section for each grade has a basketball team with 8 kids. That means that basically half of the students play basketball.
Anyway, he wanted to play with Joe and max, and I had asked them to come out. So we went over there and let him start playing with them.
I found the teachers, and got a few sentences that would be appropriate to say at a wedding hashed out.
I packed, rehearsed a few times, and then met the teachers at the wedding area when the bride’s procession showed up.
She was from a long ways away apparently, the groom was local. The wedding was a combination of western and traditional style, she was wearing a white dress instead of the traditional red, and the music playing was a western wedding march.
She was carried out of the car by the groom while the kids covered both of them in silly string.
There were lots of fireworks.
The wedding took a total of about an hour. Some was ceremony, they had to toast the parents, and the groom offered money to the bride’s father, who then gave it back to her as a present.
The whole thing was very up beat, and not that serious. Apparently most of the speeches were jabs at various other people, and the audience would cheer most of the time. I read my thing which was quite embarrassing, but they seemed happy that there were Americans there.
When the wedding finished it turned out we’d been planned for in the reception and couldn’t really refuse. We ate for about an hour. I sat at the table with Prof. wang and the village secretary. It turns out that the main point of the reception is to eat and drink entirely too much. The bride and groom would come around toasting everyone, as would the secretary and various other people. When a table finished eating another group of people would take their place. There were close to 30 different dishes.
I stayed sober, since we were going to go up the great wall in the afternoon. Some people didn’t have quite as much willpower as me.
We got on the bus after everyone finished eating. Drove about an hour to the great wall.
The wall we went to was crowded and well developed. Took a gondola up to the wall from the parking lot. Lots of vendors around the base trying to sell various trinkets.
They said to meet about 5 towers over in 2 hours, when it really would take about 15 minutes.
Jeremy and I took off in the other direction. We went all the way up to the ridge that we could see from where we were. About half way there, a sign said ‘no access’ but we continued on. Shortly after the renovations ended, and we ended up on a more natural portion of the wall. The main wall was forested over, with a small trail to walk on. We’d pass a few people, they mostly said they’d come from the other side of the ridge, which was steeper, but that this area was really beautiful. We rested briefly at the tower we’d set out for and then headed back.
We ended up where we started at 3:35, realized we were cutting it pretty close, and ran the rest of the way to the download point. It turned out that we were ‘sliding down’ which meant that there were little 4 wheeled carts we sat on and went down a curved metal pipe. It was fun, although not really worth paying for.
I grabbed some water back at the base since I’d gotten dehydrated on the wall.
We got on the bus, and got back to beida at about 6:30.
I’m still pretty tired and have a headache, but I’ve got a test tomorrow to do some studying for before going to bed. Pictures will probably show up tomorrow; I don’t have quite enough energy to do that today.