Hunted down dinosaurs, tried to get into the Forbidden city but ended up shopping instead

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Having read about the Beijing Natural History Mueseum in the guidebook with it's wonderful dinosaur exhibition the boys and I decided to go on an outing to find it. I consulted the map and decided we could take the subway and walk to 1.5km to the mueseum. So off we went - big mistake - first of all the map was lousy we wandered around in circles at the top end of Tienamen square trying to find the right street to walk down and then when we were pretty sure we had the right one off we went. We walked and walked and walked fending off guys with their rickshaws trying to get us to take a ride to the forbidden city. After walking for 15mins or so we were feeling rather lost so after visiting two hotels asking for directions and getting some rather vague ones we finally found the mueseum after realising the straight road on the map was actually a dogs leg ! We got to the Mueseum and fought our way through the 8 or so very large school groups only to find the Wonderful display was rather dismal really. The most amusing thing was all the school kids taking sneaky shots of Lachie, chasing him around trying to get photos with him or just outright staring at him. We did visit a rather eyeopening display of disectted marine life which the boys found rather gross, so good thing that I kept them away from the display of disected humans !!

On Saturday we decided to attempt a visit to the Forbidden city. After having to walk around the perimeter of the city because the taxi driver dropped us at the exit we entered the forecourt only to discover that half of Beijing and every visiting tour group had the same idea so we made a hasty exit out the front entrance and took a wander through Tienamen square instead, we tried to give Josh a crash history course about the square and then took off for Wanjung shopping street - where we had some lunch in one of the many HUGE shopping malls and then took a quick walk through Snack Street - live scorpions on sticks, bugs on sticks, squids on sticks an eye opener for us all.

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Photos

We found dinosaurs
Lachie in front of one of the remains of one of the largest dinosaurs they found in China