Day 1

First blog of the trip! Staying in the Tianrui Hotel in Beijing, it's really nice and clean! Sharing my room with a girl from England called Sarah, she seems nice! I'll be seeing quite a lot of her because she's on my next tour as well!

Coming here was mental! Not too emotional though which was good, j think by yesterday morning I was just excited! It all seemed pretty normal till I hit heathrow and was actually looking for the boarding gate got Beijing!! Got my krispy kremes though so it was all good :)

when we first boarded the plane it wasn't very fun because the air conditioning was broken and we left late, so we were all stuck on the plane for an hour in really bad heat! Once it got going though it was fine. Food was questionable haha, but dinner was edible (breakfast not so much!) and was fun having loads of movies! Although I ended up watching silly ones like Arthur and Just Go With It cos I really wasn't in the mood for serious! Watched one called last night as well which was pretty good.

Managed to sleep quite a bit on the plane but still a major shock to the system when I arrived in at 10am and realised it was actually 3am at home! On my way to the taxi rank in the airport some random guy came up to me trying to get me to go in his taxi for the "cheap" price of 350Y but I didn't go for that (obviously a little bit more sensible mum!) and went to the proper rank...but then I got a bit worried when the taxi driver spoke no English and didn't even know where the hotel was when I had it written in English and Chinese and had a map! After a fairly long discussion with the two guys manning the taxi queue (during which i realised quite how impossible it will be to communicate not knowing any Chinese) he decided he could find it. A 45 minute 150Y taxi ride later (during which i'm pretty sure we drove on pavements and the taxi scraped along the corner of a building) I made it to the hotel in one piece.

After I'd had a nap Sarah and I went fit a walk... It is actually completely mental. Sounds stupid, but it's so Chinese!! We stick out like a sore thumb, so glad I'm not blonde anymore!

Meeting the rest of the group in half an hour! Exciting :)

Very weird to be 7 hours in the future haha.

Xxx