After the fiasco of the visas we fully prepared ourselves for the cold weather, arriving in Beijing in flip flops and thin combats, sensible girls! Having travelled for 6 months we are used to using the resources available to us, so the lovely purple Singapore Airlines socks were worn proudly with the flipflops and Jenna even made a rather fetching shawl out of the tartan blanket!

We managed to get through customs and were relieved at the sight of KFC, long live Communism! Successfully got in a cab and were looking forward to the hotel we had treated ourselves to after 24 hours travelling. Two and half hours later, a backstreet tour of Beijing and many a stop for translation purposes, we gave up the hunt for the hotel and checked into a hostel (thank god for the Lonley Planet and its language section!)

Wanting to emerse ourselves in the culture we headed straight to the shopping mall accross the street. After a visit to the bank and confirmation that it is 15Y to the pound (hell yeah) we kitted ourselves out with jeans, coats, boots and scarves (boots proved hard to find due to our giant western feet which were pointed and laughed at alot). This was followed by a visit to KFC. Jenna swears they have made the colonel look Chinese so when the picture goes up please cast votes.

Getting used to the stares and Denise being 'a giant amongst men' we hit the hotspots...

Tiananmen Square - Huge but a bit Communist and dull. Jenna was thrilled Denise made her wait for an hour in the freezing cold to watch the taking down of the flag. First place we were asked for our picture...felt like celebs, loved it!

Forbidden City - Huge and amazing at first but after a while just seems like alot of red nicely decorated buildings. Plus, this is when we relised that our 'art students', who we stupidly bought not one but three pieces of art off were actually con artists and sold us mass produced tack...welcome to China!

Great Wall - really is great and a wall.

Temple of Heaven - Amazing (its the famous round one you see in all the pics). Really was beautiful, building took your breath away. Also had the classic sign reading "No ball games, No pets, No watermelons"... do they not realise a trip without a watermelon is no trip at all?!

Summer Palace - Probably our favourite place in Beijing. Beautiful building on the top a huge hill and due to our amazing sense of direction managed to climb the f***er three times, nearly died. Grounds and lake are stunning too.

Larma Temple - Lots of people praying and burning incense to a 18m Buddha, pretty impressive!

Chinese Acrobatics - literally jaw dropping stuff. The way they move their body would inspire anyone to take up yoga.

Trip wouldn't have been complete without Peking duck (Peking is now Beijing) and it rocked!! We also have to mention the best food court in the world where we ate like queens for about 2 pounds. Although loving the food, desserts don't cut it so were glad that we smuggled in two packs of Timtams, Pods and chocolate from Oz. However, we did realise that the 300 tea bags also smuggled in weren't needed as they are rather partial to a cup over here themselves.

So, now we eat the food, drink the tea and talk the lingo (Ni hao and shixshix) we are ready to brave the overnight train and go to Pingyao.