Hello from Beijing!!!

we arrived on friday morning after a very long and boring flight, in which i managed to watch 4 films and 4 tv programmes....and still have time to spare! We had an easy journey though, no real turbulance or delays so in all a success. They had no entry forms so our flight ended up in a long queue filling them out and trying to enter (as the cabin crew only had enough for first class and buisness, typical!) we evetually made it through and got a tram to collect our baggage which was waiting for us! we decided to get a taxi but the man spoke no english so we spent 10 minutes sitting infront of a bridge before he drove to the city, then was lost for about 20 minutes when we decided to get out, by chance across the road from our hostel! Thanks once again to tonts ability to get us where we need to go!

The hostel is nice, if not a little dead in the evenings but our room is nice with an ensuite and two very hard single beds! its a good location with 24 hour supermarkets, cheap food, alcohol and internet! we decided to have a nap when we arrived but unfortunately accidently slept for 9 hours and mssed friday!! we woke up and went for dinner and went back to bed!

On saturday refreshed we decided to go to the zoo! As you can imagine this made me very happy! We caught our very expensive 10p each bus ticket for our 45 minute bus journey, where we walked down the wrong road, not noticing the giant zoo infront of us! We eventually got in and it was amazing; huge, pretty and so many animals, we were there about 3 hours and got to see about 8 pandas (one of which was a baby, like the size of the ones in pandamonium the panda programme!) We had a really great day and came back to the hostel.

Yesterday, sunday we went to the temple of heaven, tony getting us there and we werent quite sure which bus stop to get off at! it was amazing, the scale of it was crazy and it was very pretty, a very hot day as well. we are really impressed with china so far. Although we decided to go to an amusement park, which was just a park! Got lost and walked miles along the river, just as we gave up we found it and went in. we went on a sawn pedalo (tony did all the pedalling bar about 3 minutes!) instead of hook a duck you catch fish, like my harolds! very random! we had a bit to drink last night but again were up at 6am this morning as we have done so far and decided to go to the forbidden city, but went to the exit by mistake so went to the temple across the road instaed!! It was called Jingshan Park and we climbed up to a temple and had views into the forbidden city, it was breathtaking.

we are going to the great wall tomorrow and tianamen square and the forbidden city on wednesday!!

having an awesome time so far!! love this place!will write again sooon,take care, much love natty and tonyxxx