The day after our Great Wall trip was much less enjoyable. We had seen on the TV that the Olympic venues were open for the national week and decided to head there to have a look round and to go inside. It seemed half of Beijing had also decided this, making for a hectic and disappointing day. With no clear way to find out how to buy tickets, or where the entrances were, we ended up only looking around the national stadium (no idea what it's used for, but the Made...

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 ...

Yesterday we finally checked out of our first, underground hostel, and moved to another nicer one. Further from The Forbidden city and Tiananmen Square, but closer to the station and with no shortage of sights to see! We then went to Tiananmen Square for a while, and walked right round. We only got there in the afternoon, by which time the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall was shut. The Square itself is apparently the largest open urban square in the world, but didn't s...

We arrived in Beijing yesterday morning and found our hostel very easily (we took a taxi!) We were very jetlagged so only went for a small walk before dinner and going to bed. A combination of the jetlag and the hostel being 4 storeys underground resulted in us sleeping in until 3 pm today! Given that we went to bed at 9pm the previous night, that's a lot of sleep! We didn't have much time to do stuff today after that, so we decided to leave the forbidden city t...