Huaqiao Hotel Baoding

... of movies during our flight. My first impression of Beijing... it's really a big City and freezing! TOday we went to the Tiananmen Square but unfortunately the forbidden city was close. Tomorrow we will give it another try!

... and there's so much to see - but as it's an easy city to navigate (great metro system!) we saw most of what we wanted to see very easily.

Above all it was really brilliant to be able to stay at Natasha and Morag's lovely comfy place and have the great advantage of theirs and Dan's invaluable advice on what to do, where to go, how to get there etc - thank you sooo much guys, we're extremely grateful, you've been ace!

... the village for a beer and lovely lunch (mainly tofu-based as meat is a bit pricey and hard to come by in the village) before climbing back in the van to Beijing.

We fell asleep for most of the way back after all that bracing fresh air - at least relatively fresh compared with Beijing, one of the smoggiest cities in the world. So as we had a bit of a second wind when we woke up back in the city decided to head over to Nanluogo ...

... look a bit samey after a few hours. Lots of lots of big thrones and beds and buddhas etc. Suffice to say it's a pretty impressive place.

Hunger set in so we headed over to the Quianmen area behind Mao's mausoleum, full of buzzing little hutongs, for a bite to eat. Apart from the lack of actual chicken and abundance of skin, gristle and a while chicken foot in the chicken hotpot, the rest was OK.

Then ...

... those and opted for corn on the cob and very tasty caramelised hawberries - a very popular fruit here.

But then we were pretty knackered so headed back towards the flat and had dinner in the same place as the nighty before - a bit unimaginative of us but the food was great, cheap, it's close, and the menu has pictures we can point at - and had an early night in order to ensure we'd be up early enough to catch Mao in the morning.

... we were at Tianjin. We cleared customs and immigration and came out of the airport to take a bus to the train station. Our intention was to take the rapid train to Beijing.



Soon we arrived at the station and got our tickets. They cost RMB 58 each. The train arrived not long after and we boarded it. This new rapid train service was built in time for last year ...

... unpacked it was still only about 7 in the morning so we walked around the city a bit and had a breakfast at McDonald's since it was the only thing open and my stomach was still throwing a fit about something. There was, according to my gal, one thing we should definitely see in Baoding, and, since we had tickets to Beijing tomorrow afternoon, it had to be now, and that was Baiyangdian Lake. So we grabbed a long distance bus that took us out to a ...

... is really a peaceful place.
Now Baoding is a very unique city like no other I have been to in China, and most of my friends and a ex-wife all live in this city. So I will give you a little history of Baoding china and it is as follows;
Gepgraphy and climate

Baoding is located around 140 kilometres south of Beijing. It is nearly halfway between Beijing ...

... masses of people on foot. But in Tianjin, we like our wheels. Traffic is run by the right-of-way-of-the-heaviest. And surprisingly it works very efficiently - if slowly. So I decided to join the army of bikers two weeks ago. When I picked up my bike from Walmart (yes Walmart!) I was thrilled to only have paid $20 for it. The breaks flew off on the way home and landed 20 feet in front of me. No matter. No one uses breaks in this city anyhow. You can't go faster than 10 ...

We woke up kinda early this morning to head to the Terracotta Warriors. We walked down to the station to find the public bus. We knew it was bus #306, the green one, but we still didn't know exactly where that bus stopped. After about 30 minutes of wandering around the station, we finally found it. We boarded the bus, paid our 7 RMB and were on our way! Good thing I stocked up on motion sickness medicine, 'cause this was definitely a bumpy ride! About an ...