Hello,

Hope everyone is ok back home...it is the evening of our third day in Beijing and we fly tomorrow to sunny Sydney (Thank God) as it is freezing here.

Following up from my last entry, we were both quite tired and decided to get some rest before the hectic two days ahead of us and went for an early night option..unfortunately for us we were both up at 2am and talking waffle until 6am when we decided to get ready and take advantage of our brekkie (please note the porl options here are complpetly different to those which we are used to)....

Yesterday morning we began our two day excursion starting with a trip to teh forbidden city..not much to say except nice buildings but all looked the same so got tedious after a while, however some of the stories are good. We then moved onto the Tinammon Sq which is just a glorified version of Trafalgar Square, however it is Ma-hes-ive, apparently at any one time 1 million people can stand in the square. Finally we moved on to the temple of heaven where as you would expect, myself and chodu were distracted by rapping pensioners and women doing keepy uppies with a shuttle c*** (which i had to buy off her as i want to play with it on some thai beaches) and got seperated from our tour group....oh well they weren't that exciting anyway. We also managed to squeeze in a buffet lunchand a silk factory before heading to the Emperors summer palace. Chodu took a shine to our hostess in the silk factory 'The silk is gwwoon from a two woooooorm coooocoooon' She was extremely funny though! However after an eventful day the perfect ending for tourist activities was teh vsit to the summer palace, its amazing with views which belittled the forbidden city.

Today we went to the Ming Tombs which again was full of facts but more or less the same buildings as in the forbidden city (see one and you have seen 'em all). The Great Wall of China which is Excellent..made some random friends on the wall which again you will see in the pictures once they are up. Fact for you all...When the Wall of China was first built and connected into one, it was more than 50,000km long, now it only measures around 6,000 km and most of it has been restored... (tut tut)

Beijing is amazing although most talk at the moment is about how happy they are to be hosting the olympics in 2008, so we remind them London have it in 2012... people are funny out here..we have a barman who made us laugh uncontollably, Allen form Beijing, has only left Beijing to go Honk Kong ONCE yet acts like the spokesman for Tibet!! Apparently Tibet have BLUE BLUE SKYS AND WHITE WHITE CLOTHS (think he meant clouds) Words can not describe his actions but will tell more when i see you all....Also we have an amazing tour rep in the hotel called Katie, do not understand half of what she says but she always smiles so she is good in our book.

Quite a slow connection so am going to leave it here for now and will update in more detail when i am in Sydney

Nim- PS; Sej please tell kids i said hi. X