Beijing

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Firstly apologies for not updating this sooner however the internet over here is sooooo slow (and I have been a tiny bit lazy)! Also you will have to excuse the spelling and grammar e.t.c. as it is so difficult to find time to do this I am flying through it. When we arrived in Beijing on the 27th it was pretty intense. We got a taxi to our hostel, checked in and dropped our bags off and the moment we walked out of the hostel we were overawed by it all. Our hostel was in a hutong which is a load of really tiny alleys and all the length of these hutongs there are people cooking food in the street, selling food and a million other things in the street, shouting at you to try and get you in their shop e.t.c. We just wandered around for the first day trying to absorb everything. The roads over here are manic, the general rule seems to be the bigger your vehicle and the faster you drive it tends to give you right of way. We have managed to perfect a system so that when a group of other people crosses the road we muscle our way into the middle of them so if a car crashes into us we have something to absorb the impact! We keep getting stared at so much and people coming up to us and asking to take our picture. They even try and have a sneaky pic with you and creep up behind you whilst their friend takes the picture. They are all very friendly people though and we have had no cross words with anyone at all. On one occasion when we went to see the Olympic stadium, the Birds Nest, and the water cube Noddy and I were stood talking to each other and a local comes up and starts to say something about a picture. I butted in and said "yeah of course she can have her picture taken with us" at which point she said "actually I am trying to take a picture of my friends in front of the stadium and you are in the way would you mind moving please"! That probably serves me right for getting carried away with the old Hollywood A lister thing.

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We were very good in Beijing and were proper backpackers. We got up at 7 every day, got lot's of sights in and only ate once or twice a day. The food can be hit and miss here. Very few places have anything in English so it is a case of point at something on the menu and hope for the best. We were mainly eating off of stalls or tiny little buildings but decided to splash out and go to quite an exclusive restaurant to try Peking duck. We had to wait over an hour before we got seated, ordered a (very expensive) duck, and it was quite possibly the worst thing we have had since we have been here. They carved this duck up in front of you and give you the meat then they left two small bits of meat on a plat