It was one of those events you simply could not pass up. If I had heard about a Fat Boy Slim concert in Chapel Hill, chances are I would not have given it a second thought. But…I am not in Chapel Hill and Fat Boy Slim was playing in the shadow of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, with some of Beijing’s best DJs, so of course I was going. The bus was leaving at 2:00 pm and I had no plans for that morning so I was able to sleep in until 11:30 am. After a quick shower I went with two other people to eat a quick lunch at the Chinese restaurant that is located just inside the Global Village. After my quick lunch turned into a 45-minutes wait for food, I crushed a plate of pork dumprrrings (dumplings) and sautéed broccoli. Next we went and bought some early afternoon bus ride drinks and quickly biked down to Lush where the buses were preparing for the 2:00 pm departure. After the typical amount of confusion you would expect from a bunch of young people trying to direct a much larger group of young people onto a variety of different buses, in what felt like about twenty different languages, I finally found a seat. The drive took about an hour and a half and it took us well outside the city and into the mountains of China. It was my first time outside the city. It was interesting to see how much cleaner the air was almost immediately once you were outside of the city. After we arrived we checked in through the lower gate and made our way up a mountain to the concert venue. There were three separate stages, but we were told that the music would not start until around 6:00 pm, so we had about 2 hours to hike around on The Great Wall. After bartering for a cheaper ticket to gain access to the wall we began the hike. This particular portion of the wall was all up hill…and it was very steep. The consistency of the stairs was terrible at best. One stair could have been 20” tall and the very next one could be 2” tall. Our group hiked for about forty-five minutes, stopping at various places along the wall. At one point we reached a watch tower that had no access to the top, but myself and a few others wanted to get to the top so we could, and I will quote this part, “get where no one has been since the Chinese shot Mongolians from up there.” So, we grabbed a trash can, stood on top of it and helped each other to the top of the tower…it was pretty cool. Once we had all had enough hiking we hung out at a resting spot (basically we just leaned against a flat part of the wall) for about an hour with a group of guys from Australia and random others who would stop and chat us up. We finally hiked down, I grabbed a ridiculously overpriced burger for dinner and about that time the music began. The concert started off slowly, it was still light outside, but as the sun went down the concert really began to pick up. For the most part the concert is a blur. There were times I was with my group and there were other times that I would roam to a different part of the venue and see someone else from our group or someone random that I had met throughout the course of the day. There was lots of dancing, lots of techno music, lots of jumping, lots of screaming, and simply put lots of partying, but all the while, all you had to do was look up to see the illumination of The Great Wall in the moonlight to know that it was going to be a night to remember. After six hours of doing the above antics continuously (and the end of Fat Boy Slims set) a small group of us loaded onto the bus to go home (some people were lost and others wanted to stay longer). As the bus drove off I immediately passed out and the next time I opened my eyes we were pulling up in front of Lush. Most of the group agreed that they wanted to get some late night at McDonalds, but not me…I hopped on my bike (still trying to decide on a name for it) and flew home. I do not really remember, but if I had a guess I would say that I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. It was an epic night out.
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