Was an early start to the day..walk to the train station seems a little longer with a 20kg backpack on.
FINAL OVERNIGHT MODE OF TRANSPORT!!!! can't tell you how exciting that is. However it was a day time sleeper train- nothing worse than that to mess the old body clock up!
Arrived in Beijing (yet another destination I've spent years talking about) at 23:00 bit of a rubbish time to arrive.
Hostel is huge! Our room has a window yay- as a result it's much easier to wake up, bed kind of resembles a giant cot though. Made some friends in the pool room, an America and a Canadian matt and bones both fluent in Chinese living here.
First job of the day- laundry I know it may seem odd I'm even mentioning it but if you could see the state of our clothes!! Mart has been wearing the same boxers for about 3 weeks now finally made him buy 2 new Pairs. As usual hostel washers are horrific even more so when everything's in Chinese. First spin didn't even wash anything tried again but anything black is ruined.
Disasterous news..the section of the Great Wall I was so eager to hike and had researched so much is closed for restoration. Little gutted!! In the process of trying to find a new section.
So we head out- mastered the subway which is a massive result. Walked and walked found 3 tourist info centres. None of which had maps? We found a hotel that gave us one, realised we'd been walking in the wrong direction..
Headed to tianaman square..turns out it really is just a square. It was really sunny In Beijing so I made mart buy me a small umbrella hat..there all the rage here. I normally wear them just for festivals but here it's just the every day norm!
After that we tried to find pub street. And failed miserably. Turns out the map only has every few streets on it. And no one can speak/ understand English to help you figure it out. We're not in Kansas anymore!
Anyway after a pit stop some wifi and google maps we managed to find hooters!
GOOD chicken wings and chilli cheese fries..moijitos beer and sports. The girls were lovely wanted to know all about the Vegas hooters. They even treated us to a dance as it was our first time in Beijing. Little tragic they we're all out of time! After hooters we hit the yowshow market. Get anything you want there..got mart some toms...a pin and I finally got a pure silk robe. Much haggling got her down from 500rmb to 110!
We then walked back towards the subway and decided to stop in a pizza/bar. Wow we're we in for a treat. 15rmb (£1.50) for a pint...free refills for 3 hours! Amazing. Mart actually asked him to repeat himself 4 times before it sank in! On the walk back to the subway we passed so many different scenes- old people playing cards, out door exercise classes and dance classes. We watched the Chinese couples (mainly old) almost ballroom style dancing to ancient music..a woman approached us and told us to join in. We didn't at first but have it a go twirling around - was a lot of fun!