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...

Our last few days in Xi'an all rolled into one really-we spent most of the day after the terracotta warriors looking around markets-haggling was great fun, though impossible to tell if we managed to get a good deal on anything! We also tried a mixture of street foods-some were tastier than others! We also went to a fairly large temple complewx called the temple of 8 immortals, which was really nice to see-there were no crowds, and it was nice and peaceful and eas...

Today we went to the Terracotta Warriors, we decided not to get a tour for this as originally planned, due to tyhe fact that we would be taken to loads of factories (i.e Jade Factory). It was relatively simple to get there we jut had to get on the correct bus. Once inside there were 3 main pits, the first being the most complete and most famous. the detail in each soldier and horse was fantastic. We found that most of the soldiers had to be repared or restored (w...

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...