Great Wall & Summer Palace

Today we visited the Great Wall of China, something everyone has seen pictures of. It took almost 2 hours to drive from the hotel in Beijing to the most popular (and renovated) part of the wall. It looks just like the pictures, though a steeper climb then I expected. I got up to the first high point (there were further ahead) and took this picture:

Then we went to the Summer Palace which is not a palace in the western sense but a park where the royals went when it got to hot in the Forbidden City. There is a large man made lake which provides the cooler temperatures. Some parts of this park were apparently developed using naval money so this ship was built from marble as part of the development:

Here are Steph and Amy in the Summer Palace: