hi! am having probs uploading my most recent photos to the site, which is a serious pain. hopeully will be ok on another computer in a few days. well! I cant quite remember where I am with postcards. I spent Sunday at the Summer Palace. Was lovely. Really gorgeous day and walked around with Don, the Dutch guy from the train. The grounds were just so beautiful with a massive lake in the middle. In the winter it freezes over and loads of people go ice skating on i, so thats on my must do list! In the later part of the afternoon I got a taxi to the hotel planned for the tour. Was a bit touch and go trying to find it, and at first the taxi driver just wanted me to get out at the first stop, when he saw the number 23. However, what we were to find was that the whole street behind that was classed as 23! so after a few minutes of stressing out, thinking id been given a bogus address and damning STA Travel to hell, we found the hotel! Oh btw, when losing travellers cheques (being stolen in UB) and being told, 'oh its easy to replace' its a complete lie!!! it took over 2 hours running from one place to another in Beijing to sort it out! Luckily Don was with me, so didnt totally dispair! Yes, so on to the tour. That eeving I met the rest of the group. Theres 18 of us in total, a full lot. Quite an age range from Duncan, 18 to some in their mid 50s I think. Theres also a good mix of males and females. Quite a few of u, are eithr on our gap years-Duncan (going to cambridge next year! this is his first part to his travelling gap year), Byron, 18 going to Leeds. This is th last thing hes doing on his gap year of travelling, and then me. Then theres Chris, (Chrsitine) who Im sharing with and is changing careers, she not sure what to yet though. She got a whole year of travelling literally all over the world, and is 5 month into it I think. And Paul who also wants to cahnge his career from teaching. I wont go through the rest of the people yet and theres quite a lot of them! But interestingly, theres twins from Brazil, from San Paulo (?) thts the place you stayed near, right Rach? So yes back to the tour! Our first proper day we went to the Great wall and did a 3 hour treck across it over renovated and unrenovated parts. Some of it was soooo steep, and for most uphills I was on all fours. We passed 30 towers and ended up at Simertai, I dont think that the right spelling but Im in a rush! Next day we hit Tianamen Sq and the Forbidden City. The sq was ok but really liked the Forbidden City, although there were HEAPS of tourists there. Roger Moore does an audio comentary which was quite funny in parts. That night we got the overnight train to Xi'an, famous for its Terracotta Worriors. We arrived there at 6.30am and headed staright to them, to beat the crowds. I was really impressed. Esp as we were like the only ones there at the beginning and felt very special. All the worroiors are baed on the actual army of the Emporer and so all had individual features. This evening we're going into the Muslim corter to get some dinner. For lunch we tried the cities' delicacy of dumplings. There was vegetarian ones so I was well chuffed. After a day of wondering around Xi'an, we hop on another overnight train to Tai'an, tomorrow. Where we'll climb a very big mountai and stay with a local family. G x