I think Pink Floyd wrote a song about this.

In the heat of posting 5,001 blog entries all at once, I forgot to tell you about the Great Wall of China, which was the impetus behind A and me going to Beijing in the first place. So, though it’s about a week late, here goes…

When visiting the Great Wall, you have a couple of choices. The Badaling section is the most visited, and, I’ve been told, is like the Disneyland of Chinese dynastic stone masonry. It’s also the easiest to get to. So of course, it’s not where I opted to go.

No, I opted for the Jinshanling section—a more treacherous route that hasn’t really been kept up. Some parts were completely crumbling away along the top, which made it much more of a challenge, and, I like to think, a more authentic experience. Plus, there weren’t many other hikers to disrupt our commune with Chinese history.

The Wall itself was incredible. It stretched far beyond the eye could see, and I was blown away by the sheer magnitude of it. Plus, it’s perched along the topmost ridge of an entire mountain range, which must have made building it an absolute bitch. Man’s ingenuity and sheer will to create will never cease to amaze me.

Sometimes when something is particularly cool, I make myself stop and take a mental snapshot of the time and place and my general state of being before offering up a little prayer of thanks. It usually goes something like this: “Right now, on mm/dd/yyyy, I am [insert what I’m doing here]. And it is amazing. I’m so incredibly happy to be here, and so incredibly glad I'm not watching reality TV.”

If I’m far enough away from other people, I’ll even say it aloud because I feel that verbalizing something tends to give it more weight than merely thinking it. That, or I’m just a crazy person who likes to talk to herself.

Anyway, my whole day on the Great Wall was made up of a series of perfect moments. It was hotter than Hades, and I probably lost half my body weight to sweat. It was physically quite grueling, and my legs were shaking with fatigue by the end. But so much the better, I say. Because I don’t want easy. Unless, of course, it involves money—then easy ain't so bad.