Hello! Today faced the usual sleepiness! Jet lag is a killer. Luckily I'm not as old as Ben who is taking it a lot worse than me! We got up later than planned (again) and went to a bakery on the way to the metro station to go out. Ben tried to play safe with some pancakes and I chose a pastry thing with icing on it that also had either ham or bacon in it with cheese, onion and peppers. It was the most sugary meat I think you could imagine! It was like a sweet pizza but I did eat it all. Ben's pancakes weren't all what they seemed and had something weird in the middle. It was grey. How many grey foods do you get?! He said it was like marzipan or something, but no way was I trying the grey mush!!!
We went to Beijing Zoo after the food commotion. It was £2 each to get in. There was a reason for that. It wasn't a nice zoo. It was quite inconsistent for the amount of space and quality of cages the animals were in. For example, a lion and lioness were in a tiny cage and were just pacing around, the same with the elephants. They were just doing the same thing so they looked bored/distressed. I didn't like it. But animals like the giraffes and monkeys had quite a lot of space and were running around pretty happily. On the way in we had to queue up for tickets and a woman was begging who kept showing us one of her hands which was deformed. She clearly thought she had a chance with the Western kids and wouldn't leave us alone, it was horrible. Yesterday there were loads of women when you came out of the Forbidden City who are holding children to beg at you. One of them wouldn't let go of Ben's arm so I just left him to it!
In the zoo there was an aquarium which you had to pay extra for to get into (a bit naughty seen as the guidebook recommended that was the best part of the zoo-probably why you have to pay separately! We also paid extra to see the giant panda's but that wasn't much) the aquarium was about £10 each but we decided to go for it. It was very different to the zoo. They had lots of variety including some whales, dolphins and seals. They did a dolphin and seal show which was a bit weird as we couldn't understand anything! It was still good though. Ben has never seen anything like that before so I can't wait to take him to Seaworld in Oz and see if he notices the difference!! The thing that I didn't like the most today was how people treated the animals. They were banging on glass and cages to try and get their attention for the perfect picture (they love their photos!) and even places where there were signs for no photography, they still took them. In one part of the aquarium there were giant sea turtles and one man was throwing coins at it, then when it came over he was balancing coins on it's head. It was terrible. For lunch we hit some fast food place in the zoo for a double chicken burger, it wasn't the best but at least we knew what meat it was!
We spent about 5 hours or something at the zoo so we didn't make it to the Summer Palace as planned. We came back feeling very sorry for ourselves after 2 days of walking lots! My feet felt like they were bleeding. I fell to sleep by accident when we got in and we decided just to eat in the hostel restaurant. I had a club sandwich with chicken, lettuce, onion and Mayo with fries and it's possibly (and sadly) the best meal I've had since getting to China! More so because I was really hungry, knew what I was ordering and knew what I was getting. It's 3 beers for the price of 2 so we're currently camped out here. We asked about watching United and I'm not quite sure the barman understood as he mentioned watching it here - I'd expect it to be closed by that time though. It's over 5 hours off so I don't know if I could last that long anyway, never mind 2 more hours of watching it. We're practically the only people in here too so at least if it is on we won't have any competition for the channel! The people that work here on reception are then always in the bar at night. I don't know whether they live here, but they certainly work a lot so I don't expect them to want to stay up and watch the football! I'm trying not to get my hopes up so we shall see what happens...