Today's visit to the Great Wall of China reminded me of how rich and full China's history is compared to the United States. The United States has only been established for a few hundred years, whereas China has been around dynasties spanning longer than the entire history of the US. It felt surreal to be walking on one of the seven man-made wonders of the world. I can't fanthom how many individual people must've died constructing the Great Wall to protect the great community that they were a part of. Although most of the workers were slaves and prisoners, I couldn't help but get the feeling that it was a noble job. The result of their collective efforts ended in becoming the only man-made structure visible from outer space.

After the Great Wall, we visted the Olympic Village. It was a stark contrast comparing the Great Wall, which was built thousands of years ago, to the newly constructed Olympic buildings. There were many noticable differences between the two, but there were also a lot of strong similiarities. An easy to notice difference between the projects were the reflection of the change in style and architecture preference. The Great Wall did not have many unique features whereas the entire Olympic Village was full of unique architectural features. Unfortunately, one of the most striking similarities between the projects were the high number of fatalities for the people working on building the stuctures. It kind of shows that although the Chinese people have come a long way from their thousands year history, there is still room for a lot of growth and improvement.

The last, but not least memorable, part of today was the amazing food we got to try out. All three meals had delicious food! It was great! I loved the steamed, red bean buns at breakfast, the green beans at lunch and the taro flower for dinner.

We took many pictures of our adventures today so be on the lookout for our uploads when we get a reliable internet connection.