After the trek on the wall we rewarded ourselves with a bit of a lie-in and rose at 10 to try and organise our onward travel. We'd been told by our hostel reception that the train down to Taiyuan was already full until after the weekend but that if we wanted the bus instead we could just turn up at the bus station and jump on the next one without a problem. We decided to pop down the tourist information office just to check this was true.

Now this should have been an easy task, we'd seen on the map that the office was about a 20 minute walk away and so headed out planning to go there quickly and spend the rest of the day at the Summer Palace. Chinese reality struck once more when we arrived at the point indicated on the map and discovered yet another building site. This was going to take a while longer. We headed for the second tourist information spot near the train station. Again we arrived at the point on the map to find no sign of a tourist information building. We searched around the area for about 15 minutes and had just about given up when we finally spotted tourist information, tucked down a side street and invisible except from the bridge over the street we luckily happened to be standing on. After an excruciating wait for a very friendly but clueless Indian man to finish haranguing the poor man behind the desk we finally got the nugget we'd been waiting for, we could just turn up and get the next bus. It had taken us over 3 hours. We headed for lunch and decided to give up on the Summer Palace for today and have a look at the Olympic site and then have a better look around Tiananmen Square now it was open.

Unfortunately, today was to be a day of frustration. With the Paralympics having only finished a couple of days previously the site was shut for cleaning up, so we could only see the site from a distance. The stadium does look incredible and the cube is even bigger than it looked on tv but the effect was definitely not the same as if we'd been able to get up close. Dave had managed to get in while the Paralympics was still on and had seen a little of the wheelchair basketball finals but for me it wasn't to be.

We got the metro back in to Tiananmen and noticed the marked difference in age and cleanliness of stations and trains the further we got from the olympic site. Don't get me wrong, no station was grotty and the whole system puts the underground to absolute shame, but there's definitely a special effort been made for the Olympic area.

Tiananmen turns out to be a disappointment to some as they expect to see a huge square empty of buildings as far as the eye can see. In reality the square is populated by gates, a couple of buildings and the final formaldehyded resting place of the Chairman. We'd missed the morning opening of the mausoleum but weren't too disappointed in missing looking upon the lifeless shell of the man himself and wandered gradually from end to end. Tiananmen has much more history than just the protest we saw on our televisions in 1989. It was here that the Emperor's decrees were often first read to the people, here that Mao announced the victory of the Communist forces and the establishment of the People's Republic, here that the yearly grand processions of Chinese armory were inspected by the party. So much of Chinese political history happened on that same square and yet I still found it difficult to think of anything except the image of a lone student standing in front of a tank. That's the thing that I'll never work out about the Chinese. They are so friendly on an individual basis, yet they have a history peppered with periods of people grouping together to wreak havoc, mainly upon their own country and fellow countrymen. Churchill called Russia a 'riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma'. I don't think the Chinese have the cynicism to be a riddle. A history containing virtually no democratic tradition and a pervading philosophy (Confucianism) that encourages bottling up emotion seems to have left the Chinese with a strange mixture of outward obedience to authority but inward resentment and anger which occasionally boils over when tapped on correctly, as Mao did in the cultural revolution. But then I'm making the error of trying to group over a billion people together as one entity. I'll leave them as a 'mystery wrapped in an enigma'.

For our last night in Beijing we decided to have a decent meal and tried to find a few bars. We headed out for a restaurant at about half 8 but found that Chinese people don't generally eat very late and so the place we were aiming for was already preparing to close. Thankfully there was a decent looking place next door and we headed in. We perused the huge menu and I decided to be daring and went for a dish of boiled bullfrog in a sauce of some description. The frog itself was quite tasty, a bit like frog to use the oft repeated comparison. Unfortunately though, the bones had been left in, so my meal was an excruciatingly slow process of picking small frog bones out of my mouth!

After the meal we headed out and found a street full of bars of all descriptions, most no bigger than the average front room. We originally settled in one playing 90's R'n'B (Mark Morrison was our highlight!) then moved on to one with dance music and finished up in a rather bigger South American-styled place. It was a lot of fun and we headed home content that at least we'd been able to get a few drinks without a hitch. Of course the day wouldn't have been complete without one last problem, but after some frenzied knocking we managed to wake the night porter and get him to let us in to the previously locked front door!