The week I had in Mongolia was probably the laziest I have been since leaving home......so was really nice!! The hostel was really homely and whilst I did go out every day, I didn't actually do all that much. However I did get to cook quite a bit and watch some movies (though in the ratio of 1 to about 5 that Tom managed to watch!!). So I left Mongolia at 8pm on Sunday on a sleeper train. The Mongolian trains are actually far nicer than Russian ones, so I wasn't too dissappointed at being back on one.

However.........Monday morning I woke up with something that loked like blod dripping either side of my head. I presumedit was oil and moved to the other end of my bed. When my sheets were collected they asked why they were dirty so I showed them, and it turns out it was actually mutton blood dripping through the roof, but it was secret!!

We stopped in the border town of Erlian for a few hours before getting a sleeper bus to Beijing. This has beds 2 high and in 3 rows up the bus! It was really fun except the beds are all at an angle to you end up in the tiny box at the end that is meant for your feet, but in which I had stuffed all my belongings, and it was really cold and Tom didn't really fit in the beds.

We arrived in Beijing at 5am on Tuesday and accidently ended up in a 6 floor clothes market. There were 3 of us all with our big bags, looking very lost so got a lot of funny looks!

I have really loved Beijing so far but there is too much to do here so its very tiring. So I managed to fit in visits to Tiananmen square, the forbidden city, obviously the Great Wall (at Jinshanling), th 798 art district, the hutong district, the olympic stadium (we went at night so saw it went it was all lit up) and the temple of heaven park. However, for me the highlights of Beijing were: renting bikes and going through the Hutong district (narrow alleyways with housing and dodgy looking restaurants/shops, though there were some touristy sort of ones that were really nice), some parks, rush hour traffic and heaps of huge new sky scrapers; going to the massive markets that sell literally everything and then haggling over about 10p; trying all the new foods and at last being able to use chopsticks properly......in the markets they also have all the weird sorts of bugs on sticks like cockroaches, scorpions, spiders and starfish and unfortunately some are still alive, I'm still too nervous to try anything though.

I left Beijing and Tom (we have now split for possibly the rest of our trips as he is going through central China and I'm going down the coast) on Monday evening. I arrived at the train station and found that there were no English signs and nothing to tell me where to go. Luckily when something weas announced there was a big rush of people that I could pushed along in and it turned out to be where I needed to go. So being on a budget I'd gone for the cheapest train ticket and ended up in a carriage with 130 non-english speaking chinese people! The whole journey was noisy and uncomfortable so I had around half an hour of sleep.