Friday 23rd March

Woke up around 9 am and had to wait out until 2 pm for our train to arrive in Beijing. I was very excited to return to Beijing, I was looking forward to eating something other than heavy meals for the next couple of weeks. I loved the dumplings and all that, but it was extremely heavy food and hearty!

We met our new honcho Roxi (her English name, I don't even know how to pronounce her Chinese name!). We headed off to the hotel to shower and get ready for some food, duck was on the menu!

Much to my annoyance there was building work happening in the courtyard, which was right outside our window. This also meant no hot water until 8 pm. Typical! I did brave a shower, but it was FREEZING! I could hear Stu screaming like a girl!! I went downstairs to check emails and messages. This was then I realised, social media blackout! So basically if you need to contact us in the next few weeks, please email or leave a message on the blog boards! This was annoying! Never mind, I'll just have to catch up posting my photos when I get to Hong Kong!

We went out for some Peking duck! I was so excited! It was damn good! Roxi ordered us a whole bunch of items! All tasted amazing; the only annoying thing was that there were 11 of us so pickings were small! But it was still amazing! After our fill we went onto the main high street. It was huge which neon lights everywhere! Beijing was a lot cleaner than I remembered and there wasn't as much pollution. There was however a million of bikes everywhere and crossing the road was even more dangerous as bikes don't stop! You also have the motorbikes and electric mopeds that whiz past you when you not paying attention! We went to the night market that sold weird and wonderful things to eat. Stu and Brenton decided it would be a good idea to try fried snake and spider. The guy selling these weird and not so wonderful foods kept screaming 'PENIS YEAH'. In the end they also brought fried sheep's penis. I did not try anything; I couldn't even look at them it made me feel ill. BLUERGH! I told Stu he wasn't allowed anywhere near me until he brushed his teeth at least 20 times!

We returned back to the hostel and sat downstairs in the bar for a beer. It cost a whooping 80p for a large bottle! WOOO!!! We decided to get some washing done as we needed clean clothes! This took longer than anticipated. The dryer was literally as useful as a chocolate fireguard. In the end we hung all our clothes around makeshift washing lines! Anything we could use we used! It also took a whole day to dry the larger items! After our eventful day we went to bed ready for our last day of the tour. Sad times!

Saturday 24th March

Today we went to the markets! It was very different than a normal market. The Chinese have learnt the most annoying English phrase possible, 'What you looking for?' After hearing this over 100 times it became very tiresome! Some women grabbed me by the arm and blocked my way asking if I want a handbag? I kept telling her no, but I don't think she understood! I had to prise her hand off my coat in order to escape! Crazy woman? At the markets it is traditional to barter with the locals, I hate bartering as I am crap at this! Stu however got really good at this! Not as good as Phil who really got a good bargain with all the things he brought! Also I am regretting bringing my Ski Le Gap jacket, it has a logo of the French flag, with the British and Canadian maple leaf on top, but they only see the Canadian maple leaf so they assume I am Canadian. I suppose they could assume worse of me! After a purchase of some jeans and a fake watch we left! We worked our way back home via the bus; Beijing has done well since the Olympics were here. Most road and important signs have English translation (some are rather amusing!) and every stop is repeated in Chinese and English. They also seem to have TVs on all buses showing random adverts/shows and announcing the stops too!

We sat in the hostel lobby using the internet to do a bit of work for the next few days, I also had to call the bank as I tried to take some money out but they blocked the card. Kind of annoying but was sorted out as easily as the card was blocked! We left the hostel in search of lunch. We ended up in a random café and ordered by the generic pointing at pictures followed by the sign for one! We end up with noodle soup type of thing! It was delish, but was a bit close to home and reminded me of the pot noodles we had on the train.

We made a stop in the huge shopping centre, which is still under construction, and got lost round looking at what was on offer. I finally got a pair of tweezers, the one thing I think I forgot to pack for a grand total of £1!!

We made our way back to the hostel and had some time before dinner; we went for a traditional hot pot. This is basically a giant bowl of water heated by hot coals and you literally put in your meant and veg and let it cook. Once again, sharing with 11 people meant fighting for your feed! I somehow cannot get my fill and have been hungry for the last few days!

Roxi took us to a popular hangout spot for drinking for locals. It was in a beautiful setting round a lake, which by day you can rent out paddle boats. All the lights were reflecting off the lake and it was just gorgeous. We spent a few good hours drinking; I was knackered so went home with the other girls which didn't happen. I ended up skyping home where dad had given me good news! Instead of sending 4-5 packages home containing souvenirs, presents and any warm clothes that we didn't need home, one of the planes was coming into Beijing tomorrow. I had to call to get the plan of action, which was annoying as I told Lesley we would meet her downstairs at 10 am to go to our next hostel and she had just gone to bed! We had to get to the other side of Beijing towards the airport by 10:30 am! No problem, another early wake up. I warned Stu via text as he was still out, apparently he didn't get home till 3 am, not that I woke up to greet him!

Sunday 25th March

We got up early seeing as we had to pack our bags, put them in the luggage room, get a taxi and travel through the centre of Beijing to the hotel to meet Mike to pass over the things I didn't need any more! It was a slow journey to the hotel, but it was only £4 for 40 minutes, so I'm not complaining! We meet Mike and Paul and we had a coffee in the executive lounge of the Marriott. It was very nice! It was lovely to catch up and have a chat, I made sure that Mike would pass the message on to Keith to remind him not to give these bags to the client as I don't think he'll be too happy receiving hat, gloves, thermals etc!!!

We got another taxi back to the hostel; I checked where our next hostel was which apparently, is not the same hostel as Lesley! Good job we had to go see Mike first thing otherwise we would have ended up the wrong end of town! Our new hostel/hotel was a 15 minute walk, right next to the main strip! It's a very posh cheap hotel down a hutong (small side street of the main road). We literally dropped our bags into the room and tried out the subways. We had planned to go to the Summer Palace this afternoon. It was pretty crowded full of tourists, Chinese tourists. I think Beijing is the only place in the world where you see more Chinese tourist than western tourists! They are very recognisable with their silly guides holding flags/sticks for them to follow and they all have the same baseball cap! It is rather amusing to see.

The Summer Palace was the summer retreat for the Emperor. Stu kept making comments at how does one person need this much space? I told him to wait until we went to the Forbidden City, as this was nothing! We walked along the lake and up to the top where the Buddha Incense Temple was. It gave a beautiful view down on the lake which was populated by hundreds of paddle boats. We strolled back down and got lost through the back gardens! It was rather warm today and was just a pleasant day out in general.

We got back onto the tube to go back home. The tube was amazing, very clean and worked brilliantly. Everything had English translation and you knew what stop you were at while traveling through the various stops. The tube cost 2 Yuan for a single journey, which is roughly 20p. Amazing value for what you get!

We decided to go back to the first restaurant as we enjoyed it so much. It proved a lot difficult without Roxi with us! The usual pointing and signing helped! We overestimated the dish sizes. We forgot we had lost 9 people and we had ordered way too much food! We had to eat as much as we could which ended up with us unable to move for the next 5 hours! We retired back to our room and slept of our food overload!

Monday 26th March

Today we woke up and got out for 10 ready to hit the zoo! I had another one of my stupid accidents; I leant on the towel rail too much and broke the holdings for the rail. OOOPS! I don't know my own strength sometimes! Hopefully we won't get charged! I'll make up some stupid story saying the towel broke it!

Since we are not visiting Chengdu, the famous place to see the pandas, we had to fit it in somewhere. It cost us £2 for the zoo, what a bargain?! Considering how much they had in there! They also had a huge aquarium for £13! We went to the pandas before it got too crowded. We went into the panda house where only 1 of the 3 rooms had a panda, I was disappointed. We stood and watch for a while since it had its back to us for about 5 minutes eating his lunch! It looked rather dopey and sat to eat some more bamboo! We walked outside and realised there was outside enclosures. They had 2 more pandas that were sleeping in the shade. They looked adorable! We stood and watched for a while before we moved on. It's easy to notice where the animals are as everyone crowds round them.

The one thing that annoys me about Chinese tourists at home is how they are so ignorant of signs like, no flash photography, no tapping on the glass and do not feed the animals. I just assumed these are in English so they don't understand. However in China it is in Chinese and they STILL ignore it. A group of tourist were feeding a bear (a huge brown bear might I add) and the zebras popcorn, right in front of said sign. This annoyed both Stu and I, but there wasn't anything we could really do. I hoped that the zebras would bite one of them, I stood around for a while trying to horse whisper to the zebras to bite them but no. Maybe another day?!!

We had a good couple of hours in the aquarium, there were no sharks, but they did have beluga whales. They do make one heck of a noise which could be heard throughout the aquarium!

We had spent a good 5-6 hours walking around, but we had to leave to get back to the hotel ready for our tour meeting.

We meet our new travel companion's, 3 Sweds, 2 Danish, 2 Germans, 1 American, 1 Polish and us. We felt a bit out of loop seeing as most of them came in couples/pairs so they talked amongst themselves and was really hard to get any response back from them. We befriended the American and Polish who came together. We went to a local restaurant and it was might tasty. Leon our new guide ordered for us, which is Leon chooses a bunch of things and we eat! We popped to the supermarket to buy some breakfast for tomorrow as we had another early start, 7:30 am.

Tuesday 27th March

We woke up at 6:30 am and got ready for our bus to take us to the Great Wall! We had a 1hour 40 minutes' drive through Beijing to the wall, the main reason for an early start is the traffic is horrendous and to beat most of the crowds. The wall was built along an east-to-west line across the historical northern borders of China in part to protect the Chinese Empire against intrusions by various nomadic groups or military incursions. I was pleased we didn't go to the most popular location like I did last time. It was relatively quiet, with mostly western tourist rather than Chinese. This was always a plus! We stopped at the bottom and we had to walk to the wall but about a million steps (it felt like it was!). Leon recommended walking to the left towards the top of the mountains. This meant an uphill struggle! I was already knackered by the time I got to the actual wall! We walked from post 10 to post 24! We spent about 2 hours 30 walking; we did stop for 10 minutes to re-fuel on food! It was an amazing view from the wall and seeing the wall snake along the mountain side was incredible. Much better than the more touristy section I visited six years ago. The wall was broken up every so often with towers where the guards lived/slept/ate while not on patrol. It was baking hot, and we both caught the sun a little bit. We wished we worn shorts! There were a few people wearing massive coats and gloves!! How is this possible? We were dying and they made it worse as I felt hotter looking at them! There were some pretty steep ascents and the steps were so uneven. Once you had got used to walking tiny steps, suddenly without warning there was a step double the size that would catch you off guard and you would end up looking like a stumbling fool! Even more so than I normally am! I stopped going further when I saw how steep the next set of steps where. It was huge, I honestly thought, screw this I'm done! I sat and watched Stu go to the top with the camera to take the pictures!

We turned back to retrace our steps, the best part was the majority of it was downhill. My legs were shaking uncontrollably and walking down the step sections was interesting. I think this was the most amount of exercise I have done in a very long time! We had to walk to post 6 to get the toboggan down instead of the steps! This was well worth the £6! It literally was a silver flume type of thing, you sat in a plastic sledge with a lever to push forwards to go faster and back to slow down. It was so much fun, until we caught up to a guy 6 people down who was going so slow and caused a traffic jam! It was possible a very unsafe device, but hey, I won't be here again very soon so I took the opportunity!

We grabbed a sandwich from subway, if I had facebook I would update my status to 'I just ate a sandwich!' just to annoy Phil! We jumped back on the bus to go back to Beijing. The first thing I did was have a shower, after 4 hours of walking I needed it. We had noticed the towel rail had been fixed now, hopefully we haven't been charged extra for this!

We also went out to venture for some dinner. We ended up in the shopping mall, which had a good selection of restaurants on the top two floors and we went for a Korean restaurant. Not that Stu noticed the difference. It was good though and cost us £6 for the both of us! We then got some ice cream from dairy queen, so in total our dinner was £9, brilliant!

The one thing I have come to terms with is that if I was going to get fat, I would want to get fat here! I honestly don't mind putting on a few extra pounds, not that I think I will seeing all the locals who are skinny as hell!

Wednesday 28th March

We all met downstairs for 9 am to go to Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City. It was a pretty warm day, in the 20's so I am very happy to be able to whack out my shorts! We walked from the hotel to Tiananmen Square, which isn't too far away. It was literally heaving, like normal. Apparently it gets worse in the summer! The square can apparently hold 1 million people, which I find useless seeing there are 1.3 billion people in China! We spent about 15 minutes in the square before being stopped by random Chinese asking Leon if it's ok to get our pictures with them! They wanted a picture of the abnormally tall Germans (these are the 3rd Germans I have meet so far on my travel and they all seem to be huge!) and with the girls. Stu got confused with the orientation with one 'girl' and after asking Leon we have confirmed it was a REALLY gay guy! Stu was kind of worried as he seemed to take a liking to him!! The locals in Beijing are used to westerners, but Chinese who have come from the countryside, also on their holidays, have never seen a westerner in their life. They like to take pictures to show their friends and family at home. They all try to be sneaky taking pictures, or in some cases come right in your face with a camera, without some warning. I don't mind if they ask, but being so blatant really annoyed me. So I enjoyed making some horrible faces or turning around just to ruin their photos!

We headed back towards the Forbidden City through the gates that has a picture of Chairman Mao hanging proudly on the top. Chairman Mao was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution. He was the architect and founding father of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949, and held control over the nation until his death in 1976.

It was getting warmer by the second, and we couldn't understand how some locals were wearing fur coats, hats and gloves! Made me feel hotter looking at them! But then they must have thought we were crazy in shorts!

We headed inside the city forbidden from everyone but the Emperor. The roofs are covered in gold/yellow tiling and the buildings had painted pictures of dragons on. These were reserved for the Emperor only; if you were caught with yellow tiles on your roof you would have been killed! All the buildings were so beautifully decorated; there was two quarters to the complex, the office and living quarters. We went to have a look in the throne room, which felt more like a mosh pit, to get a good view and trying to fight against every Chinese pushing in and out! Stu managed to get one decent photo after about 5 attempts! It was hard sticking together as they were so many Chinese tourists in their tour groups, each guide had a unique flag/umbrella which they stuck in the air for the sheep to follow! Leon did not have such a device so the odd hand went up so we could locate him better.

There was an impressive stone picture along the staircases which had 9 dragons carved into it, only the Emperor was allowed to use the number 9. There was a description on how they managed to move the stone into its current location, during the winter they splashed water onto the road so it would freeze as ice and the slid the stone across the ice into its current location. How clever!!

We headed into the living quarters which had hundreds of buildings; in total the Forbidden City has over 8000 rooms! Lord knows why one needs so many rooms! The living quarters were spilt into two halves, one for the Emperor and one for the Empress. There were several rooms on display, but it was literally a battle fighting to get any space to look inside the windows. Still every building had the same yellow tiling and dragon paintings on the outside walls. We walked into the gardens past the hugging tree and marriage tree; both trees had grown into one another and the Chinese all fighting to get their picture in front of it. The garden was beginning to bloom and had several white and pink blossom trees which looked lovely.

After a couple of hours we escaped the madness to go for lunch. Once again Leon ordered some food and we all tucked in. There were a lot of mushrooms on offer, but I wasn't brave enough to try any! Once again the food was delicious and we headed back to the hotel full!

I pretty much passed out when we got back to our room, I think all the walking from yesterday has caught up with me and I didn't wake up until it was dinner time! We went for Peking duck again, but at a different restaurant than before. Leon had also ordered some other dishes for us, one was spicy fried beans. It was extremely tasty; I think I ate the majority of the plate seeing as it was covered with hundreds of chillies and everyone was moaning it was too hot. Table manners seem to go out the window, considering you have to eat everything with chopsticks, I am tempted to take Simon here as he would hate it!!

I literally could have been rolled home last night by the amount of food I ate! Got back to the hotel as passed out asleep again!

Thursday 29th March

We had to check out today, we took our time getting ready and packing our bags, I have managed get rid of enough stuff so I can now fit my coat into my bag woo!! But I feel like I need to make more room but I don't quite know how yet!

We checked out and left our bags downstairs in reception and went off to the subway to go to the Temple of Heaven. It was a short train ride away and emerged next to the market we visited a few days ago. We walked around the, what we assumed, outside walls of the temple. Some local in a rickshaw device came over and started saying 'no, no' and we weren't quite sure what he was trying to say. I think he was saying no to us walking and to get in as he wanted some money. We ignored him, which he also ignored and followed us down the road still trying to talk. He did give up in the end, and we hoped we were going the right way so we didn't have to walk past him again! Luckily we arrived at the entrance and pay a reasonable 30 Yuan, £3 for entry for all the sites in the temple. What a bargain! The surrounding park was full of locals learning to dance and playing racket sports. Everyone was out enjoying the weather again, which was in its 20's again!

We went to the Prayer Temple of Good Harvest, where the Emperor would come to prayer and make sacrifices for good rain and harvest for the year. It was busy, but not as busy as yesterday which was nice! The buildings were decorated with the same dragon paintings as the Forbidden City but the roofs were blue and not yellow.

We walked towards the echo wall, where to you can whisper (if there are no tour groups!) on one side and people can hear you on the opposite side of the wall. We gave it a go, we had to speak a bit louder than a whisper but it worked. It sounded like I was speaking to Stu on the phone, very particular!

Our last stop was the circular mound, which is up three levels with 9 steps and surrounded by circle of big slabs, 9 layers. The Chinese believe that there are 9 levels to heaven and also only the Emperor was only allowed to use the number 9 for anything! The Emperors seemed to be greedy here!

We sat down and watched an aerobics class going on; it was rather amusing seeing 30 odd locals doing some kind of what I would describe as line dancing! Stu brought this feather thing that the Chinese use to play keep ups, but without a football. I guess it looks like an oversized shuttle cock. Stu played with his new toy, until he kicked it at some innocent bystanders and we moved on hastily!

We were hungry and jumped on the bus to find some food, we went into the shopping mall and Stu had a kind of noodle soup and I had fried rice with egg, bacon and random veg. However Stu being a pig still was hungry so we went to McDonalds where he had a double cheese burger meal and a big mac. I think it is unfair how he doesn't seem to put on any weight! The funny thing is all of this food we had today still only cost us £10 for the both of us!

We sat in front of the local church which is used by skateboarders by day and dancers by night. I laughed watching at the skateboarders getting annoyed when they couldn't do a trick. Some even get so annoyed then throw their boards on the ground with some rage! We headed to the supermarket to pick up a few things before our train! No noodles though!

We left the hotel to get to the train station at 5:30 pm, it was a mission to get on the subway being rush hour and the fact the nearest tube station is always busy!!

We made it to the train station and Leon went to get our tickets and double check what the platform was, it is really good having Leon here sorting out the difficult parts out. We had seats booked in the hard sleeper, the beds weren't hard, it just the class it was called. The train is very different from what we have experienced so far, for starters each compartment had 6 beds and no doors so everything was open! It was an experience! I had the very top bunk or shelf as I call it. It was ok actually; you can get out the way and have your own space! It was really warm though with 6 people sharing a compartment!

China doesn't like to be on time I have noticed! The lights all got switched off at 10, hinting to go to bed! I climbed, miles, to my bed and settled down.

Overall view on Beijing:

Beijing has changed a lot since 6 years ago; it is still a chaotic place with hundreds of people! The food is fantastic and the people are friendly, sometimes a little too friendly! The Olympics have done a lot of good to Beijing from a tourist perspective. You can never seem to relax here as it seems to be moving at the speed of light 24/7.

Total miles travelled from UK: 8162

Transport taken:

Trains = 15

Hours ahead of UK:

+8

Our Photos:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150949850728986.528326.501883985&type=3&l=1b65022046