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hi! My name is Kathryn. aka. Kat.
19 years old.
UWA Law/Arts student. Majoring in History.
Avid traveller.
I speak Italian and want to learn Mandarin.

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a little more

I buy Spring Valley juices just to get the Liddle Fact.
Number plates interest me.
Books have overtaken my room... Doesn't help that I work in a bookshop either.
Guilty Pleasure: The $3 Crossword scratchies waste away my little spare change.
Me and my over-active imagination will someday rule the world.
Incredibly gullable and naive. But that's just how I roll.

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Steps

posted on Monday, July 11, 2011 at 10:30 PM | 0 cmnt/s

No more steps. Ever. For the rest of my life. Ever again.

So. We did the Great Wall of China today. And gosh was it spectacular.

We arrived fairly early enough that we beat the crowds at the beginning. There are two ways to get up to the wall: walk or cable car. Walking is the silly option because it takes so long. So cable car instead :D

Once at the wall itself there is not much else to do besides start walking. So you begin walking at it's alright to begin with. Then it starts to get tough rather quickly. And when I say tough, I'm seriously not exaggerating. We are talking about 80 degree angles down and up on old stone, at times on a horizontal angle. Very exhausting stuff in heat. But then you look back on the wall that you've just walked and you see it snakeing over the mountains and it's just stunning. Admittedly, the sight would have looked better minus the smog that finally became visible today, yet the views that we took in were breathtaking.

After we gave up on the wall, we went to a restaurant which I believe is named The Schoolyard. By George it was a brilliant place. All outdoors, fresh and friendly feel and great service. The particularly novel thing about this place were the place-mats: a blank A3 sheet of paper with crayons provided so that you could draw a picture, of which, presumedly, the best were picked to be used as covers for the menus! It was just so cool!

Following that, we took a long drive to the Ming Tombs, which are indeed full of historical significance. However, by this stage we were all exhausted, hot and sticky making this stop off a tad uninteresting.

Once we returned to the villas, and after a quick cup of tea, our energy returned in time for more shopping! Todays purchases:

4x large pendants (the same type from Saturday)

3x handbags (oh, dont give me that look... You can never have too many handbags!)

1x bracelet

Some souvenirs

All in all, I'm doing pretty well with my money. Still got more than enough to last me through to the end of Xi'an in a couple of days time.

It truly is amazing here in China. It's so different and interesting. Can't wait to explore the Forbidden City and Tianammen Square tomorrow.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone