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Published: October 6th 2008
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Day 35 - Sunday 5th October - Woke up at 9am and thought i'd have a few more minutes kip. Next thing i know it's midday! Seem to have this constant feeling of tiredness now. I think i'm just becoming lazy. First of all we headed to the shopping centre and spent a couple of hours sorting out things we needed. I've now got enough books to see me through to Australia and a new memory card ready for whenever i am able to finally put some pictures up. Then we went to se the Forbidden City. On the way in a woman stopped us and enticed us into doing a day long tour of The Great Wall and a few other sites of Beijing. So now we had a plan for the next day. Minutes later a young guy came up to us offering to take us on a tour of the Forbidden City. We had just planned to wander around it on our own but we took up his offer which turned out to be a bit of a mistake. It all started well, with 'August' (all the Chinese have English names we can use for when i forget their real names), taking us into the city and telling us a bit about the history of the Chinese dynasties. But after a while his knowledge seemed to fade and he resorted to mainly pointing at things we could just read instead. On top of this it was cold and i'd put my whole backpack worth of clothing in the wash (first washing since Poland!!) so didn't have a jacket, and not being true sightseers we soon got bored. Also, although he spoke english, being Chinese he seemed to just pronounce the vowels to each word so after a while i just made up my own stuff and guessed what he might have been saying. We finally managed to escape and cut the tour short and headed back to our hostel. On the way back we passed a shop that sells police lights that go on top of police cars. If we still had 'Mitch' then we would've bought some! We also passed a food market where you could buy anything from centipede to fried starfish. None of us fancied any of this although we did go to a chinese restaurant where we ordered 4 huge dishes and a large bottle of coke for less than 8 pounds.
After dinner we went back to the hostel and met up with Paul and Brad. These are the guys from Southend who we met on the Trans Siberia Rail. Brad is definitely out of money and is flying to Australia in a couple of days but Paul is sticking to his original plan of getting trains all the way to Singapore. So he is going to join us. Well, really we are joining him as he has a whole route mapped out which means we will now be travelling through Vietnam and Cambodia before reaching Thailand. We've booked to stay in Beijing for an extra day whilst we sort things out.
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