I'm loving china so far everything is just so fascinating and the food and people are awesome!!! It's all made easier by the fact that your money goes so much further over here. For the price of a modest motel in nz we have got an apartment in Beijing that is as big as our house minus one bedroom and has two enormous marble bathrooms both with showers one of which you could fit five people in if you were so inclined. We had the Beijing speciality of Peking duck last night at a gorgeous restaurant complete with fish pond and chefs cooking in woodfired ovens as a spectical- absolutely delicious!!! Skye whose been showing us around Beijing has been really awesome with all the history including all the years emperors and empresses of different dynasties and what they got up to just flowing of her tongue. They are such a symbolic and superstitious people every colour placement and positioning of every statue, building has a specific meaning which I've really enjoyed learning about. There is no way y would get as much out of going around these places on your own without all that info. I find the history here so fascinating and the various palaces and temples beautiful its amazing the pure size of some of the palaces and their parks that were just built for one person in some cases. One park we went to is now a popular hangout for what they call seniors here (retirement age for women 55 men 65 that makes me not far off if I lived here) they are just amazing most of them doing some form of exercise including tai chi, aerobics, dancing keeping balls on rackets, hackysak, monkey bars and heaps of them doing the splits etc, pretty impressive at 70+. We're off to catch a night train to Pingyao shortly. Xoxo sandy

On the airplane I had no sleep for 9 hours but it was ok because when we got to the hotel we had a nap for a hour then we got up and went had some dinner then went back to bed and me and Paige woke up at 4 am then went back to sleep.Then we got up at 7 am and meet our tour guide Skye and she took us to the Temple of heaven it was very interesting and big but not the biggest one we went to. The next day we went to the Great Wall of China it was huge it is the biggest thing we saw. Did you know that two people walked the entire Great Wall but it took them 506 days and they camped on the wall as well in tents. Hope every one is having a good time and hope Wellington is having a nice summer this year unlike

Calvin

In Beijing we went on two tours they were very interesting on one tour it was very fun because we went skating we went on these chairs and you have to sticks to push your self along. It was cold brrrrrr !!!! But it wasn't a ice ring it was a frozen lake.

By Paige