Beijing, and China is over for this time, going to bed now, then straight to airport, and heading for Bali!

Our first day in China was spent not doing much, after we'd checked into hotel and everything, as I felt pretty ill..

Saturday, I woke up feeling all fine again. So we went out sightseeing around Beijing. Luckily we live close by most of the attractions in town, so we walked down to Forbidden City. First we took a walk in Jingshan park, a beautiful park, where we could have a beautiful view (if it wasn't for all the smog (tåke) over the city.) The Forbidden city was next, we didn't quite know what to expect, but it was definitely big, and very crowded. We are not even in the tourist season anymore, and there were people everywhere! Mostly Chinese tourists, and seeing as China has the highest population in the world, we can't really complain, but still…pretty happy about not going here in major tourist season, that's for sure. We got an audio guide (høre på cd guide), and walked through. Disappointingly, it had only one ear plug, and that was not enough to drown out the sound of the crowds surrounding us. It was beautiful there though, impressive buildings, as you will see on the pictures (once I can log onto Facebook again).For some reason (think it's the blonde hair), we became the tourist attraction for all the Chinese tourists there. They all wanted to take pictures with us, and teenage boys and girls came up to us, giggling, asking to be in a picture with us. We find this phenomenon kinda funny, and are enjoying our little "15-minutes of fame" while we can. There are now lots of pictures of us all around China, or at least Beijing!

Next stop was famous Tiananmen Square, where we hung out and took some pictures, when two young girls come over to us, they don't ask to take a picture, but seem really excited to talk to us, and ask us questions like everyone else has done earlier the same day. For this reason, we don't find it particularly strange that they ask us to go have some tea and lunch with them, after we've already said we are going for lunch, and unlike us, we actually say yes, why not make some new friends? This was not the best idea we've had so far on the trip, and I wouldn't say I am a naïve person, especially seeing as I have travelled so much, I thought I would never get scammed (lurt). Well, I was wrong!I am embarrassed to write about this, because we feel really stupid, but after having read many similar stories online, we realized we got out of it pretty well (actually better than anyone else we've read about yet!)

Anyways, they find us a place to eat and have tea. It's a really nice little tea house, and the four of us get a small room to ourselves. We get our own waitress, who makes us different kinds of tea for us to taste. I don't even normally like tea, but this tea was really good! We had a proper tea ceremony, while learning lots about Chinese tea traditions. The Chinese girls are really nice, we talk about love, life, work, everything.We ask questions about China, and they answer, so we learned a lot more about China than we did from any other tour guide we had. We also have a nice little lunch, decide to buy a box of nice fruit tea, and are generally having a great time… Until the bill arrives!This is when I realize something's wrong, and my manners (folkeskikk) leave the room. The bill is saying this meal, tea ceremony and tea boxes will be a total of 2200 Yuan. That is 2000 NOK,or 400 Australian Dollars, 350 US dollars. Divided on 4, that is about 500 kroner each. No way!I get pretty angry, and don't really care what anyone thinks of me, as I'm pretty sure this is a scam, I never say it to their faces, but my gut feeling tells me there can't be any other possibility. We tell them they can take their tea back, no way we're paying 300 kroner for a bag of tea, so they have no choice but to. Then we're left with 220 kroners each to pay for lunch and tea ceremony. Now, this probably doesn't sound that much, except we're in a country where we both have dinner for under 100 kroner. In the end we end up paying the 220 kroner they expect, and I can't even look into the girls eyes as they say we need to keep in touch by e-mail, and bla bla bla…We just go straight home, and analyze this situation over and over again, until we google the "teahouse scam in Beijing", which sadly proves our suspicions right, we were fooled, many others have been scammed in this way, losing thousands of kroner, when they thought they were just making new friends..

Thinking about it now, I know I would have paid 150 kroner without thinking twice, after all, we had lunch and a tea ceremony with lots of nice tea. So I was scammed out of 70 kroners, and that's too little money for me to care about. Reading online, people have been scammed for thousands, having bought all the tea boxes and paid for the Chinese girls as well, so at least we weren't that stupid.What I think is the most sad, is that these girls spent 3 hours of their lives, sharing stories from their lives (which might have been all made up, yes, I know, but they really didn't seem like it), giving us so much information about their country, and us having such a great time, and then it's all fake.I normally never have lunch with strangers, and I definitely never have lunch without checking the prices (anyone who knows me, knows that!), but the one time we let our guard down to be open to something new, this happens. Our first taxi driver charged us way too much to drive us to the hotel, and stuff like this happens all the time in Asia, I know this, but I've never been scammed like that before… too bad… I'll have to go back to being skeptical to everyone who's friendly again..

On Sunday, we decided to go to Mao's underground city, where there are supposed to be libraries, hospitals etc. under the ground. After a long and confusing rickshaw ride, we to try to find it, but can't. Finally we meet a friendly man who is Chinese/Canadian, he helps us, asks people, no one seems to be able to answer, until someone says " Underground city. No more!".So we go to a shopping mall to do some shopping, but by 2 pm, I feel so ill that we go back to the hotel, and I fall asleep until 8 in the evening. No good…I think I had a fever, and generally felt really horrible, luckily it's getting better and better each day now.

Monday we had booked a trip to the Great wall (Kinesiske mur), originally we had booked a hiking trip, but as I was feeling pretty rough, we cancelled, and got on a hotel tour. We were the only tourists (low season), and had our own driver and guide for the day. We started off at the summer palace, where the royalty came for the summer. It was beautifully set by the water, with lots of nice buildings. Then we went on to some shops, where they tried to sell us stuff very overpriced. Funny thing was they sold a mirror which was the exact same as I bought in Moscow for 25 kroner, here it was 5 times the price! I told the salesgirl, and she just looked very shocked and refused that it could be true! Hahaha…After lunch we finally came to the Great wall. After a long, and unsuccessful discussion with our guide, whose English was terrible, and she seemed to understand whatever she wanted to understand, we ended up at the most touristy part of the great wall, taking a cable car up. We managed to go somewhere with fewer people, and took some great photos. It was soo steep (bratt) on many parts of the wall, so we had to hold the railings (gelender) to be able to walk up and down. It was great being there though, it's something I have always wanted to do!

Today is our last day here in Beijing, and China. Our flight is at 8 am tomorrow morning, and we need to leave the hotel at 4 am. Going to bed early tonight! We went to the Beijing zoo today, and saw real panda bears, they were very cute and cuddly, but also very lazy, most of them just slept. We also saw a white tiger with little baby cubs. After the zoo we decided to try once more to go shopping, and went to another mall, where we were contacted by two young Chinese girls. Again! They were obviously trying to scam us, as they just stood there waiting for us to walk by, then talk to us, so we ignored them and walked away, this time we're not going to be that stupid! Haha! Didn't do much shopping though, just looked around, kind of hard to buy a lot when there's not much room in the backpack, and from now on, we need to have below 15 kg on the Air Asia flights.

China has been interesting, we have been scammed for money by almost everyone (taxi drivers, girls, guides) which is sad, that obviously what they see when they look at us is all money and not an actual person. I had been to China before, but that was in the south, and completely different. Beijing was a place where I am happy to have been, but not somewhere I feel I have to go back again very soon. I am glad to have seen the wall, and forbidden city, as that has always been on my list of things to see. The Chinese food is something that has disappointed me very much, I love the Chinese food at home in the restaurants, but here it does not taste the same. It doesn't really have any flavours at all, surprisingly. If it says on the menu; noodles with vegetables, it means noodles and ONE type of vegetable, here they like to use the bok choi (or however it is spelled, an Asian green lettuce-like vegetable). The only other vegetables we have seen are capsicum (paprika), tomato and cucumber. Not so much fun to be a vegetarian here!

After a lot of back and forth, we've finally got a taxi to take us to the airport in the morning. We never knew it would be this difficult in a big city, but it definitely has been. Our airport is not the main airport, but one in the nearest city to Beijing, and for some reasons, taxis don't like to drive outside of Beijing. The hotel finally found someone, and even got the price down from 700 yuan, till 450 yuan, we're probably still being scammed, but not for so much!

Next time I write, will be from Bali, Indonesia! So long! :-)