Soooooo on the 5th Sarah and co got up disgustingly early and went to explore some more of beijing - me being sensible stayed in bed :) and so got more than the three hours or so everyone else got! After this I watched some dvds and finally headed out for a massive last minute shopping spree :) :) On our last night we headed out to the kung fu show and then got a nice "family dinner" together before wasting the evening. Yesterday morning one of our gr...

Sorry we've been out of contact for so long! Serious lack of internet in Beijing. We arrived a fair few days ago, and since then did a three hour trek along the Great Wall of China. The wall was spectacular, and the section we did had very few tourists. It was definitely the hilight of China for me! Beijing is a MASSIVE city so you have to get taxis a lot, but the tube is only 20p per journey AND it's really clean (why do we pay so much in London when it's so muc...

Okay so I gave up faffing with the map... we are actually in Xi'An at the moment. On the 28th we left the BaoGuo monastery and headed to the train station, we got onto the train and started a 19hour train journey (killer) We arrived in Xi'An on the 29th March and obviously headed to bed for a nap. After a rest we headed to the muslim quater to enjoy some of the dumplings (a speciality around here) and whilst Jules, Sonia and I headed to explore the Ming City Wa...

After the last blog, we got a bus to the bottom of Mt Emei. Some of the group decided to do some walking and view the giant Buddha up close, but Jess and I chose to take the boat and view it from the water. We also inspected the "reclining Buddha" from the boat (Chinese people seem to be fond of thinking that plants and rocks look like animals and people: apparently one of the hills looked like a Buddha but it didn't particularly look like anything to u...

Since the last blog, we did a Szechuan cookery class: we learnt to make sweet and sour pork/tofu, kung po chicken, chinese salad and dumplings. After the cookery, we went to see a cultural show, including szechuan opera, AMAZING shadow puppets, an acrobat (who could rotate a coffee table with her legs really fast), a musician (who played czardas really fast), and this crazy thing where dancers wear masks, but are then able to change them in like literally second ...