Day 22

I arrived in Beijing ready for a brawl. Now, I'm not a violent man but had wound myself up so much on the train that I felt like bringing the pain on the first person that bothered me. Fortunately for Beijing, that was Daley, and he knows karate and that so I wasn't going to mess with him.

In another uncharacteristic twist, the pair of us managed to find the bus heading towards our hostel and work out which stop we needed to get off at. This flurry of activity served to calm me down and by the time we reached our stop I was over my momentary irrational hatred of everyone. (I must add at this point that in my mind I had convinced myself of two things on that train journey. The first, was that I would have no trouble disposing of any opposition, should a conflict arise. The second, and the reason for my confidence, was that during the train ride, the irritation and frustration endured had directly resulted in me developing the impressive fighting skills of a Chuck Norris-Steven Segal-Mr T hybrid, primed and ready to dish out an 80's master class in ass-whooping.)

Our hostel, The Red Lantern House was tucked away down a forgettable side-street, alive with locals going about their business. When we checked in we were greeted by yet more uncharacteristic behaviour, friendly Chinese people, and shown to our room right next to the bar. (Well played Red Lantern. Immediately pens glowing reference for Hostelbookers.com.) Our first task while in Beijing was to sort out visas for Vietnam, so we asked the hostel staff for directions and made our way over there on the subway. We found the Vietnamese embassy eventually, after initially waiting in a queue for ages that was only issuing US visas for Chinese nationals (still not sure how we didn't figure that one out,) and then made our way back to the subway, stopping at the Silk Road market on the way.

After that we took the subway to Tian'anmen Square before making our way back to the hostel to look at tours of the Great Wall. In the evening we arranged to meet up in a bar with friends we had met in Xi'an. We walked in the wrong direction, the right direction, in circles, the lot. For two hours we walked in the rain and didn't find a single bar. In fact, we didn't find a single place to suggest that any kind of evening enjoyment was had in Beijing, so we went home cold and wet.