DAY 1 - The Great Wall of China The Great Wall of China is the longest structure ever built by humans. It covers much of the northern border of China. If you take the length of the entire wall, plus various branches, it is around 5,500 miles long! No wonder they call it the Great Wall. There are over 7000 lookout towers along the wall. So what were they looking out for? The wall was built to help keep out northern invaders like the Mongols. The Mongols were pretty scary. If you ever watched the movie "Mulan," those were Mongols that were attacking the capitol. The wall as a big and super long effort to keep the Mongols out of China!
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DAY 2:  The original Great Wall was started by the Qin Dynasty. The Ming Dynasty that came later built most of the wall that remains today. The laborers were peasants, slaves, and criminals. Some were people that the emperor didn't like; building the wall was hard work and there wasn't enough food --working here was a terrible punishment. Soldiers were like the foremen of the building --they were the bosses. It is estimated that millions of people worked on the wall over 1000 years it was being constructed. Some historians think that up to 1 million people died working the wall. People building the wall were not treated very well. Many were just buried under the wall when they died. The building materials for the wall was whatever resources were available nearby. The first walls were built using compacted dirt that surrounded the stone. Much of the wall later on was built with bricks. 

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This Chinese animated short shows the sacrifice so many common people made in building the wall --creative.

DAY 3:  Can you see the Great Wall of China from the moon?  One popular myth about space exploration is that the Great Wall of China is the only human-built structure that can be seen from space. But this is not true. The reality is that you can’t easily see the Great Wall with the unaided eye, even from low Earth orbit. And certainly, the Apollo astronauts couldn’t see it from the Moon, even though that urban legend has been widely circulated. In fact, all you can see from the Moon is the white and blue marble of our home planet.

Night cities are visible from space because the light they produce, but sorry... no Great Wall.  ("Can You See The Great Wall Of China From Space? - Universe Today". Universe Today. N.p., 2013. Web. 21 Aug. 2016.)

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Image below from lower levels of space with high powered zoom lens

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The Great Pyramids - http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/images/eol/2003/pyramids.jpg

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DAY 4:  "NATIONAL PARKS 100 YEARS BIRTHDAY" --see extra places and Sequoia National Park

DAY 5:  The Great Wall of China is always covered with tourists. In one section alone there are over 70,000 visitors each day! Since the Great Wall opened to the public as a tourist attraction, hundreds of millions of visitors have been to its various sections.

​The Badaling section is the most visited section --can you tell?!

If you ever get the chance, be sure and visit The Great Wall. It is one of the New Seven Wonders of the World and is called the "Greatest Human Feat in History." Why is it considered the greatest and not the pyramids of Egypt.  The reason is that buildling The Great Wall took longer and cost more in human lives, blood, sweat and tears than even the pyramids. In addition to being one of "the New Seven Wonders of the World," the Great Wall is also a UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

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