Hi there everyone thanks to you all for your messages it's great to log on and see them. First of all sorry for the lack of photos have got loads to upload but just having a bit of a probem at this hostel everything is in chinese when i try and do it so we will get them on as soon as poss x

Thursday 21st May - Today we decided to visit the Olympic Stadium (Birds Nest) after much reading about how to get there and about how difficult it would be to get the bus because everything was in Chinese guess what ... we decided to get the bus ! So we got reception to write in Chinese the name of the town so we could take it with us and off we went to get the nmber 104 ha ha. You can just image 8.30am in the morning evryone on their way to work by bus and there is me and Joe shorts on blonde hair stoke flag in tow lookin for the "birds nest" To cut a long story short three bus journeys later all going in different directions we decided to give it one last go and went into a hotel again nobody spoke english so we decieded to draw the olympic symbol and yeah she understood, it was just 5 mins down the road, so there we were Stoke flag out Park Inn poster out and got snapping with the camera, we managed to go inside the stadium as well got some great videos so will try and up load once we get to a decent internet place we had the same trek on the way back but made it eventually had a great day Joe is over the moon with the pictures (hopefully a couple are loaded up will do the rest asap)

Friday 22nd May - We had booked a trip through our hostel to the great wall it was a 8km hike along unrestored wall after a 6.30am pick up we drove for 3 hours to get to the wall we got all our tickets met our guide and then we got the cable car up to the beginning of the trek, Joe with the backpack on obviously! Once at the top it was amazing you could see for miles so we got one of our group to take a photo of us only for our camera to run out of battery we had not charged it since being at the birds nest all hell broke loose what the hell are we going to do we are at one of the most beautiful and famous places in the world with no camera! Don't ask us how because no one spoke english but we managed to get the men on the cable cars to get their mate to send us a disposable one up fair enough he was laughing at us because we paid a tenner and I think they cost about two quid but at least we had a camera !! We continued with the hike with our "wind on yellow camera" when eveyone else had super dupa digitals how embarrassing!! We had a fantastic day very very hard work four and half hours up and down very rugged terraine was amazing not a soul about at all we felt great at the end though very tired so we finish with a well deserved beer at the end!!!! Back to the hostel we have just been out for a chinese of cause and are having few beers laughing about today.

We are loving Beijing it is a wonderful place much better then we could ever have imagined the weather is amazing been super hot everyday we really don't want to leave but we have the overnight train booked to Xian on Sunday we will update our blog once we arrive in Xian (hopefully with all the photos and videos aswell).

Hope you are all well missing you all take care Joe and Gem xxx