Well there was carnage after our last blog entry. We popped along to our favourite hotspot Sakura for a bite to eat and discovered a bit of a party going on. We were invited to join a table of Brits, Germans and Australians and before you knew it we were all a bit worse for wear (all helped along by a Mexican guitar player creating a great party atmosphere).

Don't know what time we headed home but we didn't emerge the next day until lunchtime!

As we were in Beijing in the year of the Olympics it seemed only right that we headed over to the olympic village to take a look. We decided to use the Beijing subway to get there which proved to be far cleaner than its UK counterpart. It took 4 changes and 45 minutes to get to our destination. The size of the area is impressive as are the buildings but it was really a bit of an anti climax - even David thought that!

They have filled the centre of the birds nest stadium with the costumes worn at the opening ceremony but they are all a bit shabby and the number of people....anyway we can say that we have done it at least!

In the evening we headed to the north of Beijing with Tholston for a bite to eat and a few beers. The boys decided that they wanted Peking duck and there was no budging them even though it took over 1/2 an hour to find somewhere that sold the pigging stuff!! Take a look at the photos to see said dish in all its glory - the piece de resistance was the presentation of the ducks head, cut in half with the brains on show for you to eat - YAK!!!

We then went and sat in a lakeside bar which had a live musician playing. He played 'Hey Jude' especially for us when he realised we were English speaking - just another example of how friendly and kind the chinese are.

Sunday was our last day in Beijing so we packed up (hard work - how did we get all this stuff in in the first place!!) and headed off to the 'Temple of Heaven Park' for a wander. The best bit about this was stumbling across a group of elderly locals who had only brought along a transportable karaoke machine with them and were all taking turns having a sing song. It was great !!

We decided to get a bicycle tuk tuk thingy (don't know the official name for them!!) to get us part of the way back to the youth hostel as it was some distance. David applied his bartering skills and managed to get the cyclist down from 50 yuan to 20 yuan - he was very proud of himself!

In the evening we got the sleeper train to Xi'an - how many people can you fit in one very impressive train station. To be fair they do have a system in place to control the crowds. When you arrive at the station each train has a designated waiting area which you go into and from there you are herded to your platform and train. We were in for a shock though - the hard seats are very hard seats and with very little room. Poor David seemed to fair much worse than me, I managed to get about 4 hours sleep but David got less than that.

However the lack of sleep was overshadowed by the great atmosphere on the train. We became a bit of an attraction and were soon surrounded by a number of chinese people who all wanted to talk. David spent quite a lot of time speaking to a guy called Angel (not convinced that was his real name somehow!) and I was talking to a girl called Song Qi Shu Yu for hours. She was teaching me Chinese (lost cause really!) and I was teaching her English.