Beijing

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Well I arrived in China safe and sound and spent my first day wandering around the back streets of Beijing and then visiting the Lama temple. There were lots of large buddahs and incense! In the evening I met the group and we met our guide Ricky. On the next day we headed to the Great Wall and myself and a few others decided that taking the cable car up would be the lazy option so we walked up! 600 or so extremely steep steps later my calves were burning, I had drunk all of my water and we hadn't even seen any of the Great Wall yet! The wall was spectacular though if not a bit crowded in parts with what looked like a large crowd of army cadets carrying large flags of China! We eventually went as far as we could to tower 20 and colapsed in a pile for 2 minutes before walking back. We decided to take the toboggan down, basically a long windy slide with two controls faster and stop! 😊 That night we went to watch a Kung Fu show. It was awesome! Small children doing flips on their head and men breaking planks of wood on theirs! What could be better! 😊

The next day we visited the Forbidden City and Tiannamen Square. If we thought the wall was a bit busy it was nothing to the Forbidden City! Thousands of Chinese people pushing and shoving to see a throne in a room! Madness. The place itself was spectacular and I particularly liked the gardens at the end and the smaller courtyards of to the sides. That afternoon a couple of us got the subway to the Temple of Heaven - a large park with some very impressive buildings inside. It was fairly quite and spacious which was a novelty in Beijing! Afterwards it was slightly more complicated getting back to the hotel as we left the park from a different entrance and there was no subway to be found. Luckily after crossing the road several times we found a Chinese woman who spoke English and directed us to the number 11 bus! Hoping for the best we boarded the bus and after a very slow journey through the traffic we arrived at a destination we recognised! Hooray! Just in time to hop on another bus with the group to visit a Peking duck restaurant! 😊 Yum!

On our final day in Beijing we headed to the Summer Palace. It was boiling and we climbed and walked all over the place. The Summer Palace was lovely especially down by the lake. Afterwards we headed back on the subway to the Olympic Park. I wanted to compare it to London! London's is way better! Lol! But the Birds Nest and Aquatics centre is still pretty cool and the place was surprisingly busy with tourists. Then our final stop was the Silk Market. If you want shoes, bags or clothes this is the place to go! We were so tired by the time we got here we only managed to look round one floor before going for something to eat. Then it was off to catch the overnight train to Shanghai!

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