During our last two days in Beijing we visited the temple of heaven park again very early in the morning to see people doing Tai Chi and their morning excercise which was great and quite amazing that they do this every morning. We also visited Longtan Park which was a locals park which had an outside gym and a climbing wall which Dan was very annoyed that he wasnt allowed to use. Lastly we went and visited Chairman Mao's pickled body which entailed a 45 minute qu...

The next day we went to the Summer palace which is the home of the Empress. Getting there was not quite as easy as first thought as the tube had not been completed to the summer palace, so we decided to walk but wernt quite sure which directing we were suppose to be going. Once we found it, we found that it was set around a huge lake and an island in it which was connected by a famous bridge. the whole area was spectacular. The best things we saw were the long c...

The Forbidden City was our first sightseeing adventure once back in Beijing. After eating some street food (meat on a stick) we made our way to the Forbidden city. Even though national holiday had finished there were lots of chinese tour groups so it was very busy. The, (what seemed, never ending) sieries of temples were very impressive the colours on the building were very bright and the gold shined fantastically in the sunlight. All of the buildings were very w...

Today was the day we took our tour to the Great Wall. The day started (after we'd already got up!) With a phone call from the tour guide to say she was waiting in reception. This panicked us a bit, as it was half an hour before we were due to leave! After hurrying to get ready the reason turned out to be that she was due to pick a group up from another hostel at the same time...something which didn't seem to bode well for the quality of the day, but thankfully we...

Yesterday, we went to a park called Beihai Park which contains a huge lake and has an Island in the middle. After walking all of the way to the park which took around 2 hours (much longer than first thought!!) we decided that the best way to see the park was to hire a little electric boat in stead of walking. It was great fun and we saw much more than walking. We then went on to the island (called Jade Island) which was full of little temples leading up to a big ...