July 19th – Sight Seeing Day 2 & Planning

Today we had our second sight seeing day. We headed off to the see the  Great Wall. There are three sections of the Great Wall still in tact. It is a common myth that the Great Wall is the only man made object that can been seen from space with the naked eye. The parts that we were on were very impressive (especially for their time), but the road ways that we build now are wider. Thus, the new roadways would be easier to see from space.

We went to the section that is closest to Beijing. This was an impressive experience. After we arrived, we were given a couple of hours to explore the Wall. Some of us decided to climb the Wall. The steps are step and very inconsistent in height. This made walking up the Wall quite a challenge. The first section was very crowded (like all of Beijing). The higher were climbed, the less crowded the Wall became. A group of us went to the highest point of the Wall. It was quite the climb. We didn’t have time to circle around the other side (just in front of the highest point, Beacon Tower 13, is a fork in the Wall. This allows one to continue on the Wall around the mountain.

After that, we had a quick visit to the Olympic Stadium area. I didn’t spend much time there as I was hungry and ate lunch. We did walk down to see the Bird’s Nest. Interestingly, we have had to run our bags through a scanner when entering certain national monument areas, but they’ve never checked our pockets or had us walk through a scanner.

Next up was the transition to the new hotel and planning. Using the knowledge of the first round of training in another area, the group has made some adjustments to the schedule. We got the daily schedule set. One of the decisions was to interview the participants and ask some basic questions in order to group them efficiently. The idea is largely to group them based on what they are teaching next year.

I had the opportunity to interview six teachers. This was a terrific experience. It seems to be pretty universal that teachers are some of the best people in the world. There was a mix of students with varied English abilities. The group consisted of teachers of third grade up to the teachers of high school. Unfortunately, not all of the participants showed up for the interviews. Thus, we pulled back together for a planning session again. We made some quick adjustments as to how we would conduct the interviews. We tweaked the daily schedule (from lessons learned from the first group) and worked out our nightly teaching schedule.

I was completely exhausted by the time. I headed off to sleep.