It really is a great wall!!

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We've been in beijing for 6 days and could probably fill another 6 days, we had heard it was really smoggy here and were surprised to find it no worse than london.
while we've been here we've hit the markets quite hard, i bought some silk and some clothes and paul bought a tailored suit! we went back for fittings and he picked it up today and its lovely, really smart.
we arrived really early in the morning and as we passed tiananmen square the flocks of tour groups were already flooding in to queue up to see chairmen mao's body in the mausoleum. After dropping our bags at the hostel and having breakfast we walked to the square despite being told it was way to far and we should take the subway it only took us 15 minutes! the crowds heading into the forbidden city were huge and we were both too tired to deal with them so skipped that for the time being and walked to the pearl market which was crazy. we bought a suitcase for all our new souvenirs, i got some pearls and paul bought a north face jacket, its an exact replica of a real one, in china the people who work in the factories that make all the clothes we buy at home have a slight scam going on where they aquire materials and labels etc from the factory and then make the same designs in their home and sell them for a fraction of the cost, there are no copyright laws in china apparently so this is not illegal. The girl was friendly and jokey, her first price was 1250 rmb (125 pounds!) we bought it for 150 rmb and possibly could have got it a little cheaper! bargaining here is crazy, we bought a new memory card for pauls camera as we're running out of space, 2gb for 4 pounds someone we spoke to paid 12 for the same thing. I'm looking forward to just paying a set price for things although it might be a hard habit to break i can see me in tesco trying to haggle for my groceries!
On the second day we decided that we had enough patience to the forbidden city. On the way to the ticket booth we were accosted by numerous people offering tours none of whom seemed to understand the word no. So I tried a different tactic telling them that I didn't speak english and answering any further questions with a shrug. It worked! Once inside the city was really amazing, with lots of old buildings, artifacts and thrones but having seen so many similar buildings in various cities after a quick look round we were ready to leave. We did see a really cool exhibition of clocks which sounds a bit random but they had loads with really good actions when it chimed, including one that wrote Chinese calligraphy. In the evening we headed to the oldest Peking duck restaurant in Beijing and had a lovely meal of duck pancakes which they carved up in front of us, we politely declined our half of the head! After the meal we headed to another hostel to meet with a Scottish friend from Xi'an for a beer.
We had met a couple from the UK (Sarah and James) in our hostel and made plans to head to the great wall together so we got up at 7am the following morning and caught the bus out to miyun where we had planned to barter a good price for a ride to a place called jinshanling, walk the 10km to simutai and have the driver waiting to drive us back to miyun to get the bus back to beijing, at the bus station as we were getting on the bus we acquired a little lady who had a car and wanted to be our driver, james managed to barter her down to a very low price so we went with her in her tiny little VW golf! it took us nearly 3 hours to get to the wall from the hostel and about 3.5 hours to walk to simutai, the views were amazing and although the walk was almost a climb at times it was definitely worth the effort, we have no idea what it would have been like just to go to the tourist site at bedaling but we've heard its mayhem and packed full of hawkers, apparently you can toboggan down the wall! we only saw about 10 other tourists on our walk and only briefly as we overtook them, we saw a couple of locals who followed us a little but as soon as we told them we didn't want to buy anything they left us alone and were very friendly about it all, maybe partly because james and I used our limited mandarin to point them back in the direction of a group of americans (we didn't know the chinese for US so we referred to them as dollars which was immediately understood!) We made it back to our hostel just in time for our second dumpling party (woo hoo!) in China. We had to make the dumplings, which the chef cooked and we could then eat. It was a fun evening although we are convinced that our good dumplings were switched with the neighbouring tables not so good dumplings.
I have a friend from the Science Centre who now lives and works in Beijing so we met him for an American style brunch. For once Western food turned out good and we had a lovely time. After he showed to Starbucks for a caffeine hit we wandered to the clothing market where Paul was measured up for a suit. That evening we just chilled out at the hostel chatting to more travellers.
On our last touristy day in Beijing we headed out to the Summer Palace. It was freezing cold as we walked around the beautiful grounds and massive lake and towards the end it even snowed a little. On the way back to the city we stopped at the Olympic village and saw the Birds Nest and Water Cube which left us wondering how London will measure up in comparison as they were both very impressive and well set out. Hopefully we will have fewer hawkers selling olympic related tack...! That evening we went to a restaurant recommended by my friend from home with a group from the hostel. It was a popular type of cuisine which fuses Indian with Chinese. The food was really good, even though some dishes were a little spicy and we had a great evening which we finished off back at the hostel playing Uno.
Our last day was spent picking up Paul's new suit (very smart) and making last minute purchases before packing and heading for an early night before our early morning (4am) start for the flight to Hong Kong...

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