Hello guys I said goodbye to Dave and Christine and headed to my next destination Beijing i jumped on the train which took just under 8 hours...

I was meeting up with my friend Lisa who i had traveled through Vietnam & Laos with, she was in a tour group and Beijing was the last place they was to visit so i arranged to meet her at the city central youth hostel.. In the morning i had a knock on the door there stood Lisa, she had just got in after being on the overnight train from Xian..

So i just had had a potter around for a while, till Lisa sorted her stuff out, once she had done this we had a walk around the city, the city its self is spectacular its extremely clean the people are friendly the language barrier is a bit of a problem but you get by.

Later that evening after walking for hours we met up with heather and Damian they are in the Tour group with Lisa so we had a few beers then we headed for food..

Tonight was the night Liverpool was playing In the Final against some other team in Europe (see i know alot about football) anyway the game didn't start to 2 in the morning and the guys were meant to be up for 7 to walk the Great wall of china?as you can imagine we all got very drunk as the evening went on the game came and went unfortunately Damian is a Liverpool fan and they lost so we had to drink more by this time the rest of the tour group and come into the bar area for breakfast... And no the guys didn't make it to the wall on this particular day. A bit later on in the day once we had got up myself and Lisa decided to head to one of the parks (The Temple of heaven)Heather and Damian stayed in bed lazy gits we spent a few hours walking around the park it was beautiful and the weather was gorgeous as well...

In the evening we decided to head to a Kung Fu show, we met some other people in the lobby and headed to the show, the show itself was spectacular the story line was really good and the fight moves was awesome i video some parts so i will down load them when i have time.

The next day i decided to do a tour of the Forbidden city and Tian'anmen Square so i was up bright and early and headed to the Square the square itself has a lot of history as does the Forbidden city. i spent the majority of the day walking around both sights the place is massive and very impressive.

Tiananmen Square is a modern creation, China being a land where large public gathering places were not traditionally built. Its construction broke down walls of the Forbidden City to make way for the large thoroughfare, Chang'an Jie. Previously Tiananmen Square was occupied by imperial offices which were inside the Forbidden City and connected the Temple of Heaven to Qianmen and the palace.

Tiananmen (translated from Chinese: The Gate of Heavenly Peace) is the original gate of the Imperial Palace, commonly known as the Forbidden City. It is now one of the entrances for tourists visiting the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is the largest downtown square in the world. It covers an area of 44 hectares, big enough to hold one million people. From the red wall of the Tian'anmen Rostrum in the north to the south gate, it measures some 880 meters, and from the Museum of Chinese Revolution and Chinese History in the east to the Great Hall of the People in the west, it is about 500 meters.

(Imperial Palace) in the heart of Beijing is the largest and most complete imperial palace and ancient building complex in China, and the world at large. Its construction began in 1406 and was completed 14 years later, having a history so far of some 580 years. Twenty-four emperors from the Ming and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties lived and ruled China from there. Most of the buildings in the Forbidden City were rebuilt many times, although they maintained the original architectural style. ?

The Forbidden City, extending 753 meters from east to west, and 961 meters from north to south, makes a rectangular shape and covers a total area of 720,000 square meters. It consists of several dozen compounds of varying sizes and some 9,900 bays of rooms, with a total floor area of 150,000 square meters. Most of the buildings were built with wood, roofed with yellow glazed tiles and built on blue-and-white stone foundations, looking solemn and brilliant. City walls were 10 meters high, and a 52 meter-wide moat surround the Forbidden City. Three-storied towers are placed at each corner of the wall.

 

The building arrangement within the Forbidden City is symmetrical. The Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Central Harmony and the Hall of Preserving Harmony, which comprise the outer palace, and the Hall of Heavenly Purity, the Hall of Union and the Hall of Earthly Tranquility, comprising the inner palace, stand in a line from south to north on the central axis. The 8 km central axis runs through the entire old Beijing city to Yongdingmen in the south and Zhonggulou in the north. The throne symbolizing imperial power is positioned at the center of this central axis.

 

The buildings of the Forbidden City fully embody the artistic features and style of ancient Chinese palace architecture, and can be called a masterpiece in Chinese, even world, architectural history. Today, as the largest museum of cultural relics in China, the Forbidden City, also called the Palace Museum, collected and displayed some one million precious historical relics from the Shang Dynasty (16th century -771 BC) through to the Qing Dynasty. It was made part of the world cultural heritage list in 1987.

On the way back i was approached by to young Chinese girls they wanted to practice there English so they took me to a traditional tea drinking ceremony where we sat and sampled different herbal teas Etc, there English was very good so we spent the majority of the afternoon walking around the city chatting.

I met up with the guys later that evening and sat around chatting before we headed to dinner. we decided as we missed the walk of the wall the other day we would do it on the saturday (next day).