Our First Year Anniversary in 蓟县!

I would have to say that this year’s anniversary has been my favorite yet! ;)

Since we’ve had a tight financial month, we decided to go somewhere instead of do the whole gift thing…going and doing things are usually the best memories anyways.

We decided to go see The Great Wall (Huangyaguan) in Ji Xian 蓟县. Some friends told us about it, so with a couple of Chinese characters on a piece of paper in hand, we ventured off at 6:30 am (people who know me have to be impressed by that ;). We raced to board an extremely crowded train.

Now in China, ticket offices don’t stop selling tickets just because the seats are sold out. Oh no. There is no such thing as a maximum capacity in China. You just have to stand there and hope for a few inches of real estate in front of your face so you can breath your own air.

This is a picture of the train after a bunch of people got off…and it’s still packed!

Somehow, we managed to score a seat for the second half of the three hour ride. There we met a few college kids who helped us with directions and got us a good deal on a ride up to mountains where we would find our section of the wall. I think being a foreigner can have its benefits at times!

I can still remember our funny little ride up to the mountains. There were 8 of us in a van no wider than a volkswagen golf. We dropped everybody else off in these qauint little mountain villages. These villages really reminded me of Latin America for some reason. Small, mismatched houses with cute scruffy muts running around in the streets…and most people were hard at work preparing for winter by cutting and various fruits and corn and throwing them on their roofs to dry. Then, amidst the curves and pretty trees, we began to see parts of the wall peek out of the mountains. We were so excited, the driver got a kick out of us!

This is a view from the parking lot at the wall. It was so high and magnificent! The high peaks on the right of the picture above kept reminding me of the mountains backing the beach in Rio… Don’t you think they look similar?!

(Here is a greener picture compliments of Google. Sadly, I don’t have too many pictures of the trip, as I accidentally forgot to charge the camera the night before! Oops!)

The first thing we wanted to do was get on that wall! We did and hiked to the top of the more touristy section…but we wanted to see the un-restored sections of the wall…so we kept going…and going…and going. At times, things got pretty steep. I’m not going to lie, Jordan had to do some serious coaxing to help me with my fear of heights on parts. He kept saying “I think I see another tower right above us ahead!” Who can resist seeing an untouched piece of world history? Sure enough, they were there…and they kept getting more and more deteriorated. It was so neat, as one looked as though a canon had come right against it and blown half of the roof to smithereens… in fact, that’s probably just what happened! You could usually get inside the towers, but this one in particular had no doors or windows. So, Jordan decided to do a little rock climbing and conquer that thing. I decided to watch/assist from the ground. ;)

That’s my man!

After this tower, we went straight up for another couple of runs. We were off the wall and just on some trail for quite some time until we were on the very top of the mountain (it was quite the ascent!) We began to walk on this narrow ridge. There were parts of it that were only a foot and a half wide, then there would be a twenty foot drop off to a ridge with another huge drop for the rest of the mountain. Jordan, like his typical mountain goat self, practically ran across this section, found a nice seat on some huge rocks at the end and took a seat. He took out an apple and told me to come across so we could eat our apples together. What a tease! I was ridiculously scared and tried to hug the earth on all fours to get across. But then I turned around and saw it…below us was the whole mountain range, painted with the great wall as far as the eye could see. (I’m going to paint this for you, as I sadly don’t have a picture of this…but that’s ok, I was left to enjoy instead of worrying about a camera). To our right was the tiny village that now looked even tinier followed by a sparkly lake behind it. Down to our right was this little colorful temple. We hadn’t seen it the whole way up, and there was no viewable road to get there, but somebody happy and religious lived there and enjoyed a great sight! Directly below us and jutting back and forth all over the mountains was the rest of the Great Wall. Then we realized…WE WERE SITTING ON THE GREAT WALL! The part we were sitting on and the very narrow ridges we walked across were part of the deteriorating wall! How I wish I had a picture from the top…but I guess this means we’ll just have to go back!

While we were there we talked about the great things that happened a year before when we were married and sealed in the temple for time and all eternity. Then, as we were reminiscing about that special day, we thought how hilarious life is… we would have never guessed 1 year ago that we would be sitting on The Great Wall of China for our first anniversary!!! We’ve had a really fun year living on three different continents. I don’t know how and if we’ll ever top it…but I do know that our first year of marriage has kind of been like our hike up the Great Wall:

We were really excited to start our married lives together... learned an unimaginable amount about each other, cultures and life in general... we encountered steep times where we had to rely on each other to get through... had fun... enjoyed the view... and would do it all over again as long as we had each other.

I think that’s how LIFE should be.

You work hard. You play hard. You enjoy the views.

When Jordan and I get to see our ultimate views on the other side of heaven I want us to be able to look back and say “MAN, WHAT A RIDE!” That’s the goal.

Thanks for being my “partner in adventure” for the last year, Jordan.

It’s been quite the ride!

xoxo,

MJ