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Published: August 17th 2011
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I managed to get a lie in this morning which was lovely, whilst Lizzie, CJ and Emily headed out to go inside the Olympic Stadium which I wasn't too fused about. Instead I chilled out in the hostel, had a leisurely breakfast with some of the other girls and checked out of my room. It is wierd to think we will be leaving Beijing today as it has begun to strangely feel like home now. Around midday I headed to meet the girls by the National Museum of China where we spent a few hours inside as it was free and air conditioned! The museum was absolutely massive, probably three times the size of the British Museum and thankfully most of the signs were in English as well and Chinese. It took a while to get inside due to the intense security at the door, they wouldn't let CJ inside just because she had a bottle of perfume on her! She was eventually escorted to a locker where she had to leave it before being allowed inside. The exhibitions in the museum were pretty cool, there was a fantastic one all about Ancient China right up to the present day and gave a nice well rounded portrait of Chinese history and culture.
Whilst inside we decided to split up as CJ and Emily wanted to go to an Art Museum so Lizzie and I after finishing inside the National headed off to find the Beijing Police Museum that looked interesting. Unfortunately for love nor money we could not find this museum and after asking countless people who couldn't speak English where it was we eventually gave up as we were getting hot and bothered. We wandered around aimlessly for a while just enjoying our last few hours in Beijing and people watching before stumbling upon a Chinese fast food place crammed with locals. We decided to check it out and we stopped here for a drink for a while and sampled a dish of China's version of McDonalds. The food was awful, we were served rice, egg soup, and some mixture of spam type meatballs with peas and carrots in a sauce that tasted a little like gravy. It was disgusting and we didn't eat much of it, but we were glad we had tried it.
We headed back on the subway to the hostel ready to leave for our overnight train. We were all a tad skeptical about the overnight train as we had no idea what to expect. After grabing a quick dinner at the local supermarket and having a shower we were picked up at 9pm and taken to Beijing's main train station. Annoyingly we were picked up by our tour guide two hours early for the train, meaning we had to wait in a very busy and crowded station, all 15 of us plus baggage. Needless to say we took up a lot of room and we were annoyed that we had to wait for such a long time. Eventually the time came to board the train, and we crowded into our carriage on probably the longest train I have ever seen. We were carriage 11 and this train was so long that I couldn't see either the beggining of the end of the train itself. The carriage was a narrow walkway with beds to the left that were three bunks high. Unfortunately I lost rock paper scissors and ended up with the top bunk which was cramped, extremely cold (as it was right under the AC unit) and made me feel very claustrophobic. However tomorrow morning we will be off the train early and fingers crossed the jounrey will be okay.
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