Friday 22nd April - we walked from our hostel around the Forbidden City, through Jingshan Park, to the Lama Temple. We skirted around the outside of the City, which gave us some idea of how far back the City actually went. Jingshan Park, behind the City, was built from the soil evacuated to make the moat around the City, and as such it contains a hill from which you can get a view of the City. Although we'd walked around the City already, seeing it laid out before us was still an amazing sight.

In the park we got to catch an odd display of women performing to music with balls balanced on bats. They were twirling the bats and swinging them round their bodies and the balls never fell off. What the point was I don't know, but it looked pretty cool!

The Lama Temple holds an 18m tall Buddha, which has entered the Guinness Book of Records for being the largest Buddha made from a single piece of wood. We weren't allowed to take photos but it looked pretty amazing. The temple housed several other Buddhas and, as with other temples we have visited, was actively being used as a place of worship by people coming in off the street.

Saturday 23th April - we bought train tickets for the next leg of our trip and it was quite a mission! The train station was chaos and it took ages just to find the ticket office. Then there were the queues. After several minutes of being jostled by Chinese we realised that there was a dedicated window for foreigners and that made things a whole lot easier!

We also went to the Pearl Market, which is a big building selling all sorts of things from laptops to handbags to chopsticks to pearls. Plenty of bargains to be had for people willing to haggle. Chris managed to barter the price of a wallet and got it for a third of the price - nice one!

Sunday 24th April - Summer Palace. This was a royal garden and it's huge! It's got a massive lake in the middle that you can hire a pedalo to go round. Which we obviously did! We were on it for an hour and a half, so much fun! The garden was really pretty and we were there the whole day.

We attempted to watch the daily flag lowering ceremony at Tianenmen Square at sunset, but even though we got there half an hour beforehand it was already too busy for us to see anything.

Monday 25th April - We got up before dawn to go and see the flag raising ceremony in the Square. Even at that time in the morning there were still loads of people there, almost as many as last night.

After going back to bed for a little while we then made our way over to the Olympic stadiums. We had a walk around the Bird's Nest, which was nice enough. There's not really much to see there beyond the stadium itself. Then we went to the Water Cube, part of which has been turned into a water park. Someone at our hotels told us it was good so we packed our swimmers and we're so glad we did! We had a lot of fun at the water park and went on the flumes, including what must be one of the scariest flumes in the world! Instead of sitting down and sliding into the flume, you stand upright in a little cubicle and the floor below you disappears and you drop into the chute. It was horrible! You go down the flume so fast that there's even a bit of it that goes up, instead of it being down all the way. Needless to say, we only did that one once!

Tuesday 26th April - last day in Beijng. We took it easy today, bought train tickets for a later leg of our trip and wandered around the city for a bit.

We're now in Xi'an, home of the Terracotta Army, after another long train trip. We managed to get soft seats this time, rather than the hard seats we had before. They weren't that much more comfortable but they had more leg room and reclined. Part of the trip was done on an express train, which travelled at 205 mph!

Bye!
Lindsay and Chris