Monday 11th June Journal entry brought to you by Tami 40 minutes after I finally got to sleep, I had to wake up to get the stupid taxi to the stupid airport. Our taxi driver was clearly mental, she was totally in love with her cats, and I've never seen more cuddly toys in a car. She also said that she could never be away from her house for more than a night, and would never go outside the North Island, so until the two islands joined, there was no way she'd go to Franz Josef because she couldn't drive there. Crazy stuff. Anyhoo we flew from Auckland to Sydney, and then from Sydney to Beijing. On the flight, if you are interested, which you are probably not, I watched the following films: Music With Lyrics Pan's Labyrinth The History Boys The Holiday We then got to China and left the airport to get into a cab to go to our hotel, for which we only had the name, no address or anything. The traffic was mad and the cabbie didn't seem to have a clue where we were meant to be going. About 45 minutes later we pulled up outside this amazingly swanky hotel, that was so many millions of miles away from the other places we've been staying that neither of us thought it could possibly be the right place. We sceptically went into the huge, spacious, marble lobby (smelling rubbish having just had a 12 hour flight, and wearing trampy clothes, with shocking great rucksacks....groan...) and tentatively asked the woman on the desk whether we could check in and handed over our (crumpled) ticket for our room, and - somewhat unbelievably, we were actually in the right place. We were given our room key, and went up to the 15th floor, where we found our room, and it was absolutely amazing. We just looked at each other and were like...... 0-: . It was soooo nice! There were two large single beds, air conditioning, a fridge, a TV, ensuite, minibar.......Oh my gosh it was sooooooo cool! We just lay on the beds laughing. We had literally expected the most gross of gross hostels, I mean some of the ones in Australia were foul, but we'd heard some bad stories from other people who stayed in China, but this was just unbelievablely not like that. We were too tired to do anything then, so we just had showers and went to bed. So far the conclusions that I have come to about China are the following: 1. The driving here is awful. Really bad. 2. It is really hot and stuffy and poluted. 3. People spit a lot. 4. The hotel is really nice! 5. I'm glad we're on a tour because there is NO English anywhere and I'm scared. 6. I'm also excited because this is going to be really different to everywhere else we've been. Woop!