Lama Temple International Youth Hostel Beijing

... gave me back Y20. The quality is amazing. They're warm and waterproof and tightenable and have a spyder on them and everything. The North Face jacket is even awesomer. And it came with the fleece inside. Those suckers are upwards of £250 sterling in the North Face shop in Glasgow. Ying's was E15. Silk Street had a problem a few years ago (you can google it, I'm sure), where a load of big name brands came down on them for selling knock-offs (North ...

... was!! I gripe and groan about it but I wouldn’t change that day for anything. Through it all I did meet some friendly local people who were there to help me and that is far more memorable to me than the frustration.

On Thursday (18 Jun 09) I joined a group to do a 10km trek from Jinshanling to Simatai on the Great Wall. There were 14 of us from all around the world. One of the guys (Sascha, Germany) was staying at the same hostel. It was an early morning so ...

... We went for more souvenir type things, but there really wasn't anything good. Kristen wanted a cotton t-shirt, since all of her shirts are of the quick dry variety and stuff. So we got her a polo shirt after bargaining from 260 down to 90. I told her to go for the Burbury Polos, but she said they were too crazy. Yea, they have the polo symbol with burbury sleeves and collar prints. They are pretty hilarious. One woman tried to sell me a ...

So at long last we reached the capital of China. Much has been said and written about this city so I will spare most of the boring details outside of what you can see in our pictures. For one, Bejing has an amazing metro line, better than anything we have encountered on our trip. It is also brand new (finished just before the Olympics) so this is probably the reason why. It took us everywhere we needed to go for less than a $1 each time. Better than anything we saw in Europe by far ...

... because the pre-Olympic visa crackdown has kept foreign buy**s away. None complained. They w**e happy to sacrifice for the great** good - a notion instilled from birth. "It's the big wish of the 1.3 billion Chinese to have the Olympics," one said. "If the West has few** Fath** Christmases this year, it's worth it." For she** dynamism the Beijing Iron and Steel Company takes some beating. For 89 years its giant plant has blanketed the capital with smoke and ...

... Businessmen who travel here every month are suddenly barred. Some tourists who have bought Olympics tickets cannot get in. Scores of four- and five-star hotels built to host hundreds of thousands of guests for China's coming-out party are less than half-full and look like staying that way. Excluding foreigners from the Olympics is a personal innovation of the security chief, Zhou Yongkang. Nobody beneath him, it seems, can get a clear answer about what exactly he is trying to ...

Hello kids! As you guess if you receive an email from me, that means that I'm still alive. I've been really lazy on the email, we just enter in the year of rat in China, maybe for me it's gonna be just lazy year :) Since last time i wrote, many things happened. In January i worked in the winter camp, teaching english to young girls and boys who will be volunteer for the olympic game. There was a 1000 students, about 60 chinese ...

... of the journey. This left us with just over an hour to see the whole of the Summer Palace which was impossible. We decided just to make our way to some of the places mentioned in the guide book and ended up at the Temple of the Fragrant Buddah which was beautiful and worth the climb up the many steps to see it. We got the tube back to the hotel and quickly got changed before meeting the ...

i'm finally starting to get used to hearing chinese all the time. before it seemed like i didn't understand a thing but now i'm starting to get the hang of it. Qi Long (the boy I'm living with) is pretty good about explaining stuff when I don't understand. This family's had a boy from Turkey live with them for a year I think, so they know what they're doing. I've had my first 'ke kou ke le' (coca cola) and ...

... whole city, this from a former communist country (in comparison Moscow has about 10)! Though, I must admit it is cheap (50 cents), clean and they are building more for the Olympics/future. We later found out that people rely more heavily on buses than the subway. We met up under the picture of Mao and began to have a look around and like moths to a candle, it started - "Do you speak English"? "I am a student, I have an free exhibition, please come and ...