A TX4 is an incredible car. It has five seats for customers, two facing the other three. There are just enough seats to fit my family. Of course, like on any two hour car ride in a taxi, the sentence “are we there yet?” happened to be said at least twice every ten minutes. Finally, when we got near our destination, the Great Wall, the supposed sightings of this long defensive investment shut the questions up. However, we never actually saw the Great Wall until we were right at it. If you want to get up to the wall from any of three ticket counters you can either cheat by taking a cable car, or you can walk up a thousand plus steps to tower eight which is closer to the alpine sledding station, destination 1, and the end of the Mutian Yu section of the great wall, destination two 2. Tower ten which is also an option and is closer to cable car station one, destination 3, and higher. We took tower ten, but the destination was debatable. I knew that I was going to destination 2, or to destination 1, just a little further than destination 2. There was however, a miscommunication.
This fail lead to my family thinking that I was going a different way, so they split up to look for me. My dad found me on my way to the highest point on the wall. After a while of walking back, we found the rest of the family and walked on our way. Unmentioned in the last part, however, was a set of very steep, slippery metal steps. Not that they were wet, they just were slippery. And so a banana peel effect happened. And as always, it happened to me.
This is where the AAHHG section of the title comes into play. I had just bought a great wall medal from an old man, and he was coming behind me. Behind him was my dad, then my mom and my siblings. Three steps down, I fell ten feet to the 1,550 year ancient Chinese stone floor. Broken bones, smashed faces, concussions, and, god forbid, death, all could have happened. None however did. The only things that happened were two scraped knees and one swollen knee with temporary extreme wobbliness. After that I climbed to the top of the MutianYu section.
There is a certain form of going down that includes a lot of fun, and certain amounts of whoops, yells and “Whee”s. This is called Alpine Sledding. I however call it Alpine AWESOME!!!!!! No joke, this thing is the BOMB!!!!!! A small black sled with certain foam parts that lift up when you push on a certain lever creates your seat. There is one lever and no steering wheel, but there are turns. It is awesome. Going down was part of the reason we came up. Lean with the turns, and you will go faster. Once the five minute ride down is up, you can go shopping in several stalls.
Some of the stallsmen/women (actually more women than men), when you try to bargain will say “low si le,” which means low to death. I only figured out that they were speaking chinglish when one particularly eccentric lady did hand motions. We bought four panda hats, two Tibetan hats, one army hat, one set of ten pins, one knife, five Tin-tin T-shirts, two daoist shirts, and a bunch of other stuff that came into our hands by money burning a hole in our pockets.
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