Vincent had done well with the booking and managed to convince the guide to let us take all our luggage on the tour bus so we could head straight to the airport from the Olympic stadium which was close to the tube. We got up at 6.30am and repacked our bags trying to get them down to a minimum, we need to do another post home really but want to wait until we are somewhere warm and can pack the presents with our winter clothes.
We grabbed an egg and chilli in bread thingy from a roadside store and bought a couple more bits and pieces from the local shop then went back upstairs to clean our teeth and leave. Just as we were brushing the phone went and our tour had arrived.
On the bus were two girls from Finland. At first I thought they were sisters, but then wasn’t so sure as we had spent so much time away from western people it could have been that they have begun to all look alike to us! In fact they were twins and made great travelling companions – they wanted to hear our travelling tales, which was good because we usually tell them anyway now!
We chatted all the way to the first stop, a shop of course. The Finnish girls were surprised and not very happy with the idea of stopping at shops but after doing tours in various other countries we expected it. The only really rubbish thing was that you had to stay in the shop a set amount of time. Usually these tours are subsidised by the government and then lure you to various government endorsed shops but this one, being typically Chinese, the government had also stipulated how long you had to stay in each shop. It was far too long. We mostly rebelled by standing in the corner of the shops chatting, none of us were rich enough to buy anything anyway and as you can get all the stuff on the black market (better known as any other shop on the street) it wasn’t really even worth looking.
The first shop was one where they made the copper vases so well known in China. We saw the factory where they made the copper pots, added flat copper wire in various shapes to create a raised picture and filled the picture with enamel powder then fired it five times. It was then polished and ready to go. They were beautiful but it was several hundred pounds just for a 6 inch high vase.
The second shop was a jade factory. This was not very interesting as there was only one lone man doing the jade cutting (similar to glass cutting with diamond tools and water) then it was all ‘how to tell real jade from fake’ lessons. Real jade has a smoky texture when held up to light and rings with a high note when struck with metal or another piece of jade. The woman also claimed it was as hard as diamond – but then how would he cut it with a diamond drill bit hmmm? The jade comes in the usual green but also orange, white, black and yellow the guide said that jade formed in river beds and mountains and the location gave it different colours.
After this we went to a canteen type area for lunch. The food was a bit rubbish and the rice was terrible but I tried to eat plenty as we had the great wall walk to do next.
When we arrived at the wall the first thing that struck me was how high up it was. I knew it ran along the tops of mountains from the TV and other pictures of it but I didn’t realise how much it varied in height itself. Most of the section we were on was steps, more a great staircase than a great wall!
The guide gave us two hours, which seemed a lot, but as I started climbing (very slowly and with a lot of help from Vincent and a lot of encouragement from everyone on their way down – one American lady even proclaimed me to be her hero) I gave myself a target of the third lookout tower and I made it. It took almost the whole hour but I was very happy to get that far. Vincent went on for a bit while I sat and rested, he made it up to the furthest point I could see and took lots of pictures to show me and the Finnish girls as we kept saying we didn’t believe how high he got.
After a good pause I started to make my way down. The girls had gone on already so me and Vincent took it slowly and got to the bottom in one piece. I was so proud I bought myself an ‘I have climbed the great wall’ T shirt – been there, done that, got the T shirt 
On the way home we had to stop at a pearl shop and a silk shop. The silk shop gave a talk on silk worms and how they are either only children or twins. If there is just one then you can pull out miles of silk thread to make cloth but if its twins you have to used the silk to make stuffing. We saw the cocoon being rinsed and stretched on a frame then had a go out stretching the silk over a duvet sized table. It was extremely soft and amazing you could get so much silk from one cocoon. We realised that the duvets we had liked so much on the train must have been silk as were the ones in our hotel. They were a snip at 58 quid for a king size UK weather one, but we couldn’t afford that or carry it so once again we were left to run up our allotted time in the shop sitting down and chatting, we were so glad to have the girls along or it would have gotten really boring.
The pearl shop was much the same but we just saw her knife an oyster in half and saw that it had about 20 pearls inside naturally, without the introduction of grit. This is why good pearls are affordable in China – the lake by the Summer Palace is where they live and they are all very full of pearls.
The drive around the Olympic stadium was brief but enough to see that it was huge and very modern and clean. The camera had run out of battery by then so we had a quick look, took a couple of pictures on my phone then were dropped off at the tube.
When you go on the tube you have to put your bags through an x-ray machine, it seemed like a bit of a silly thing to do as we always flung our bags through and then wandered off but of course today when we had somewhere to be they stopped us. Apparently we were carrying an offensive object, I had a think – did we buy swords, guns, arsenic or what appeared to be a bean can which were listed on the sign as offensive – no. It was Vincent’s big bag that contained the item so of course we had to get it all unpacked. I was worried it was the thing I had bought for my dad as a present, we weren’t allowed to post it when we tried in Suzhou, but no it turned out the offensive item was .....Vincent’s deodorant! All our luggage was now being held in various piles by security team members and when they had removed the highly dangerous article (which Vincent amusingly/rudely suggested to the man he might keep for himself – Chinese men don’t use deodorant and as a result often smell sweaty, but I don’t think he understood) we repacked and were on our way.
The airport express was pretty groovy and ran very fast and smoothly, above ground some of the time and even on a raised line near the airport. The airport entrance was huge and Vincent said it was like being Jonah going into the whale. The check in desk was right where we arrived so we checked in our big bags, had a bit of time to look up at the amazing roof and then my wheelchair arrived. I was so tired I couldn’t stand by that point so was glad of the chair even if the big Arab boss of Egypt Air insisted that I had a little man to push me and that he take me to the wheelchair lounge. I would have rather looked around the duty free myself but the little Chinese guy looked so scared of the Egypt Air boss that I let him push me to the little airport driverless train and then to the ‘lounge’. It was just a holding area really so as soon as he had popped off I legged it to the only thing nearby, a cafe, and had a quick Panini.
We got on the plane on time and the flight was fine, as usual they didn’t have any vegetarian meals, even though I had booked in advance, and the movie was high school musical 3 which put me to sleep very quickly.
When we landed and got our bags and some Thai money we went outside to find a cab. We went for a prepay one which was a bit of a mistake as I only realised after that it said limousines. We ended up being driven to our hotel in a swanky 4 by 4 with a lot of AC, which was good as I still had my long johns on! We noticed on the trip that all the taxi’s really stood out from the crowd as they were all very shiny metallic colours, mostly bright metallic pink!
The hotel Vincent found was amazing, it was only three stars but was 43 stories high with a restaurant at the top. We went into our room (it wasn’t the right one so we had to change the next day as we had arrived at 1.00am on the 10th and I had booked from the 10th forgetting that it was really the night of the 9th in hotel terms) and relaxed. The rooms were all suites in the hotel and we were on the 35th floor so had an amazing view. We quickly fell asleep with alarms set to get us up in time for our yummy looking buffet breakfast on the 43rd floor!