Day 27 How do you solve a problem like a night that doesn't appear to be going anywhere? You force yourselves and those around you to have fun, of course. And that's just what we did. An executive meeting between the brain-trust led to numerous pathetic (and unopposed) attempts at justifying the cost of a big night out and so we turned what was looking like and early night in to an all-nighter. The majority of the night was spent in a room downstairs, which pla...

Day 26 Saturday began with an early start, as we got a bus to the Summer Palace with our friends Nick and Paul. Paul is from Singapore, earning him the hilarious nickname SingaPaul, and has spent a few months in Beijing so acted as our tour guide. He also prevented us from getting ripped off, which was a refreshing change. The highlight of the Palace tour was hiring a little boat for an hour and going out on the lake to escape the hoards of tourists. It was anot...

Day 25 How do you top a day like yesterday? Well, you can't but you can try lots of other interesting stuff, and that's exactly what we did. In the morning we went to the Yonghe (Lama) Temple, which didn't take long as we're all temple'd out, so it was a quick wander round and a few photos of another Buddha with a tenuous accolade, this time, the world's tallest Buddha carved from a single piece of wood. After that, it was back on the subway, heading South towa...

Day 24 All of last night's disappointment and frustration was immediately put behind me as I awoke at 6 am this morning. How could I be annoyed about anything? We were trekking The Great Wall. I was so excited. Seeing the wall had been my main reason for coming to China, so to do that and the Terracotta Warriors in the same week was tremendously satisfying. [This post should be much longer and in-depth than it will be but the simple fact is, I don't have the vo...

Day 23 Today we booked our train tickets to Hanoi, leaving on Thursday. The journey is forty hours long. I'll be honest with you, I'm not exactly thrilled by the prospect. Trying to book tickets to another country when both you and the person you are dealing can only say 'hello' in each other's native languages is difficult enough, what makes the whole ordeal worse is the presence of almost the entire office staff coming over to see what the crazy Westerners a...