Day 3/4/5

Sorry for not updating the blog for a while. We have been unable to logon to this site. Anyway. On day 3, it was all about the Forbidden City.
By this time, we had started to learn about actually looking at the map scale because what only seems like an inch on map is actually 3kms and we'd walked about 20km's on each of the previous days.

So we got to the Forbidden City and wow, this really is a city. It's crazy to think that this was really two family rulers home effectively for 500 years - the place is huge and has some amazing buildings to view but you need to be strong and force your way in if you want to view them. You learn very quickly not to be nice and let one person in with whatever you do because if you do, 10 will sneak on in as well....
So we ambled round this huge city, adding a few more km's to the walking boots whilst listening to an audio commentary and learning all about Ming we'd stop d Qing. As we're backpackers, we decided to share the audio though and so we'd stop and listen together into the one ear piece. This seemed to amuse many Chinese and they weren't bothered about staring at us, smilelaugh and talk about it in their group and all smilelaugh together. Fine the first time, after numerous, boring.....

It was great to see and experience but towards the end, the audio woman started to get annoying - she just went on and on and on and on. And as soon as you passed through a gate or past another building, she started again. Must be like being married to a nagging wife !!! So we dropped her and made an exit. By this time we'd started to realise that we weren't being particularly good to our backs and we were both struggling and looking at the map, it was about 5km to the restaurant we'd earmarked (veggie), so when a little tuck tuck type man went by, we hailed him over for an experience.
We haggled him down to what was agreed as 40 yuan (about £4) but he spoke no english. So off we went on what, as everyone who has been on one will probably say, is an experience but one where you nearly got hit, did some hitting or in our case nearly reversed into on a main road. It was a good laugh though. So we turn up and surprise surprise our little man tries the white man tax. He'd been negotiating in dollars and us in yuan. He started to produce these little cards to say he was disabled and we had to pay $70 dollars and then $30 dollars. Told him politely to bog off. Stupidly we only had 100 yuan so in the end, he opened his wallet and I politely but firmly took the 50 yuan in return for our 100. We left feeling a bit annoyed but then again our fault for not having change and a lesson learnt. In context any tube journey costs 4 yuan for both of us (40p).