Sun 3/6
Arrived in Beijing around 1pm and got our transfer to our hostel. We got a nice first impression of China, clean no tooting horns and nice buildings. Our hostel is situated in a nice quiet hútòng. It has a restaurant, bar and rooftop area. Booked a dorm for a change and met a nice group of south americans (all from different countries) who invited us out for dinner. We headed to the market where there was all sorts of weird and wonderful things on offer, scorpions, snake, sheep balls, beetles etc needless to say we weren't enticed by any of it so went to a nice chinese restaurant instead. We ordered a a dish each and all shared. We chose pork with a bean sauce. It tasted a bit weird and then realised we had ordered pig intestine. Thank god we were all sharing! Need to be a bit more careful in future!lol. Not quite up on using chop sticks either but am sure by the time we leave China we will be pros!
Mon 4/6 (Today)
Had a great day today. Didn't get up until about 11am but sleep was needed after all our travelling. After lunch we sat and planned out our two weeks, staying in Beijing until Fri, getting an overnight train to Pingyao, one night there then an overnight train to Xian where we spend 4 nights followed by another overnight train to Shanghai, got one night in Shanghai before we head to Japan. Its gona fly past! In the late afternoon we headed out to book our train tickets. Used the metro for the first time and managed to purchase a travel card from a guy who spoke basically no english, even managed to find the one english speaking desk at the train station and got our tickets no hassle. Very chuffed wae ourselves by the end of it! China so far is much easier to travel than we were expecting (only been a day tho) After a bite to eat we decided to go to the Temple of Heaven. Not on our list of things to do but we were in the area so thought we may as well. The walk through the park was great, people dancing, playing sport and flying kites (which had lights on them) all around. We couldn't get into the actual temple as it was closed but it was nice to see it from the outside (pictures not so good as the sun had gone down).