The Great Wall

Yesterday we went to visit the Great Wall.  It's a pretty good metaphor for life in China (or, I would imagine, any foreign country).

The Great Wall is awesome.  I love it.

I do not love getting to it.

There are many stairs to climb.  Like, a thousand.  Literally.  That gets miserable really fast, unless you are some kind of stair-climbing-masochist, which I am most definitely not.

This is not made any more fun by it being warm and humid.

Living in China is like that.  I love China and I love getting to be here, but I don't love every single part of it all the time.  There is a lot of daily life that is just a drag, like the realization that you don't suddenly gain superpowers when you go through customs.  Or the realization that your body may take a little while to adapt to suddenly eating vast quantities of rice and no peanut butter to speak of.  It's like climbing the bazillion stairs to get to the Wall -- you know that it is going to be awesome, and you wish that every step of getting there was a great experience, but... it isn't.

Depreena with a few of the stairs that we climbed just to get to the Wall.

And sometimes there are very unexpected bumps in your journey, near-disasters that you were in no way prepared for.

So there is this alpine slide that you can ride down from the Wall, which sounded like an awesome idea (and way preferable to taking the stairs back down.)  It was a lot of fun.  Until I, going full speed, smashed into Jeannie, who was completely stopped.  That was high on my list of most terrifying moments in China because I was afraid that someone was going to die, but no one did, and the worst injuries were some bruises and scrapes.  (He's good, yeah?)  Jeannie even got it on video.

But despite the parts that are just miserable, and the parts that blindside you, being in another country (or climbing the Great Wall) is an incredible experience.  You get to see things that you never would have had you stayed at home, on the ground.

And it's not a perfect analogy, because what He has for us is way better than what you can see from on top of a man-made structure on a cloudy day, but still. It was a good reminder.

So here are a few pictures that I took the liberty of editing.

For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.