Surviving Week One

So it's been about a week since I last posted something here. This is primarily due to the fact that this past week has been perhaps the busiest and longest of my entire life. I've literally been in Beijing for seven days and it feels like I've been here for months. But I have a feeling now that I've got the first week of class, the first week of homework, the first test, etc. out of the way, these next two months will be a lot of fun.

In case the pictures above didn't clue you in, we took a trip to the Great Wall today. This was the first of our weekly HBA sponsored excursions throughout Beijing and the surrounding area. I actually don't have a schedule of any sort so I'm not sure where we'll be headed next Saturday, but I would assume over the next eight weeks we'll hit the major spots such as Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and Beihai Park.

The Great Wall was phenomenal. For those of you who don't already know, this trip to China is the first time that I've travelled out of the States, and furthermore, my travels around the U.S. have not been very extensive (yet). The Great Wall is definitely the most well-known landmark I've ever been to, in China or otherwise. The section of the Wall that we visited is called the Mutianyu Great Wall. It was first built sometime in the mid 6th century and then rebuilt to its present state during the Ming Dynasty, which ruled from 1368 to 1644 (according to Wikipedia). Aside from the hike to and from the Wall, I enjoyed everything about the trip. There's certainly something strange (and cool) about walking on top of a thousand-year-old wall, which once served the purpose of keeping the Mongols and other invaders out of China.

I would post more pictures (since I took about 100) but the internet connection here isn't too great so it takes about three minutes to upload every picture. However, those of you who are friends with me on Facebook can check out the photo album I just posted, and those of you who aren't friends with me on Facebook are S.O.L. Just kidding. I just made the album visible to everyone, so if you Google my name you can get to my Facebook and hopefully check out all the pictures.

I'm slowly getting used to the workload here at HBA so hopefully I'll be able to write more frequently in the coming weeks. Ideally I'll throw something up here on a daily basis so that I don't have to try to fit a week's worth of stuff into one post.

For right now that's all I got. I hope everyone enjoys the pictures (and the blog in general). Let me know if you guys have any suggestions or if there's anything in particular you'd like me to write about - I'd certainly be glad to oblige.

Just remembered one last thing. I took some video footage at the Wall so I'm going to try to get that up in a separate post.

One week down, eight to go,

Jamey