Timar's Trip to the Great Wall
Timar McDonnell, Group 1: Fiction, Harrow International School Hong Kong
his is my story of the trip to the Great Wall of China that my mom and I took. The trip was my mom’s
birthday present to me for my sixth birthday. Before we went on the trip I learnt that to get to the Wall
from Hong Kong, we needed to take a flight to Beijing first. From the hotel in Beijing we also took a
taxi, and then a chair lift to the Wall. The chair lift looked just like the ones in a ski resort. Taking the
chair lift up to the Wall was exciting but my mom thought it was quite dangerous because the safety bar was not
really secure.
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When I first saw the Great Wall I thought that it was really long. It looked like an extremely long dragon’s
tail stretching across the mountains . I felt excited seeing the Wall for the first time. I read in books that using
walls as a defense is actually as old as China itself and that the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi started
building the Wall to protect China from the Mongols. The Mongols were the nomads who came from the north
of China and who attacked villages and cities in China.
I thought about what it would have been like to be a soldier guarding the Wall hundreds of years ago. I
think doing that job was exhausting. In winter it was extremely cold standing there in the snow and not moving
around. And in summer it was extremely hot wearing layers of clothes and thick armor. I also thought about all
those people who built the Wall and how hard it was. It took more than 200 years to completely build the Wall. I
read in books that many people died: rocks fell on people, walls caved in, and people died of exhaustion and
disease.
But these people managed to build something amazing: it is the longest man-made structure in the world,
and you can see it from space!
My mom and I walked along the Wall for a long time. We walked many little steps and climbed ladders to
get to watch towers. In the past when the soldiers on watch towers saw the Mongols coming they would light
bonfires to let other soldiers know. From the watch towers I could see grassy fields, many trees and bushes. It
was all peaceful and quiet. And luckily there were no invading Mongols to be seen!
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