20/10/2009Day 15 - Beijing: Summer Palace, Market, Acrobatic ShowThis morning we visited the Summer Palace, it is 4 times the size of the Forbidden City! The Emperor used it for the summer only. Everything in the Palace is so ornate; all hand painted and carved it is really beautiful. In the gardens the emperor ordered Kunming Lake be built - it covers 2.2 square kilometers and was entirely man made. The excavated soil was used to build Longevity Hill which is 60...

19/10/2009 Day 14 - Beijing: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven Today was a busy and exciting day, so much to tell you. It was the first day of our 'On the Go' tour, we were picked up at the hotel at 9am - our tour guide's name was Michelle, she was about the same age as Mum. Our first stop was Tiananmen Square. The best way to describe it is that it's like Federation square in Melbourne just bigger, a lot bigger. It can hold 1 million people f...

16/10/09 to 18/10/09 Day 11 to Day 13 - Slow boat to China We left Japan aboard the Yanjing , Mum and Dad splashed out and got us special first class cabins!! Boy am I glad they did because I would have hated to see the standard of a normal cabin!!! There was little to do on the boat so we played cards, DS, watched movies on the eeepc (Dad's mini laptop) and slept. The food wasn't very nice so we mainly just ate rice. When we arrived in Tianjin Port it took abo...

15/10/09Day 10 - HiroshimaToday was a short day. In the morning we headed out and found a 'Sky Walk' in the middle of a park were 3 giant undercover escalators and travelators, that took us to shopping centre. They went for ages. At midday we headed back to the hotel as Mum wasn't feeling well. She slept the whole afternoon.For dinner we went and had Okonomi which is a traditional Japanese dish kind of like an omelet with noodles, pork, egg, pancake and special ...

14/10/09Day 9 - Hiroshima - 'Hiroshima Castle, A-Bomb Site & Paper Crane Exhibition'Today we saw even more turtles before breakfast at a little pond around the corner from our hotel. They were sun-baking on rocks and two turtles were swimming and playing with each other.After breakfast we went to Hiroshima Castle which was 5 stories tall. In the gardens they were preparing for a festival so there were many tents, flowers, stalls and work men. There was als...