Hi guys,

Today's blog comes from costa coffee in apm mall beijing. We decided that instead of going straight back to the hotel after a hard days work to try the laptop in a more roaming way.

So its 6:30pm and we are having a latte in costa - mainly because it has free wifi and its pretty quiet.

Yesterday we ventured to Panjuayan market (probably spelt that wrong) a real flea market. Yes there were a number of tourists there but it was also packed with locals buying and selling too.

We don't have any pictures as we decided to leave all but the bare minimum at home incase of pick pockets, but if you see the photo above it was a pretty similar afair to our visit to Wangfujing.

It is full of traders - both businesses and people selling "antiques". Yeah right - not for price their asking. We were there hours and you can buy everything from garden walls (with dragon motifs) and pagodas (must have been 20ft easily) to english books and stuffed animals. There was about a million people selling jade jewelry and wooden chess sets.

Claire bought a dangly metal fish for the christmas tree and some very small 'jade' 3 toed creatures to turn into earings. I didn't buy anything but I did enjoy the crazyness if it all. Unfortunately all the things I liked were about the size of a chest of drawers and I'm not carrying that for 6 months!

Today we have been to the Vietnameese embasy to apply for visas and then the train station for out tickets to Xi'an. Its been a long day of people not quite understanding us and having to repeat everything umptymillion times . . . Hence our need for latte.

Our passports are still at the embasy till Thursday but we have the train tickets (one of the last 30.) On a plus we have worked out how to get the sony camera to talk to the laptop so we can upload some pickies.

Hope you enjoy them.

Team P