Jiahejia Hotel Beijing

... and had a few drinks in some of the many cosy bars they have there. Next day - our last one together here - we went to the Home Inn hotel again in Guomao, and after that we had our regular Starbucks coffees in World Trade Center. Indeed, even though I hate many international chains, I really love Starbucks, I just love the coffee. Then we did the basic thing to do in Beijing - we went ot Tiananmen Square. It was impressive, as always, but full of tourists. Then we had lunch ...

... lots of times the river became a huge lake and we saw little groups of people ice fishing!



The landscape made me think this is what Nepal and Afghanistan look like, from what I've seen anyway. Very arid, blue sky and lots of rundown towns.

We got to the point where we watched all the stuff we could on the laptop before the battery went. Still have 12 hours to go.....

Saw quite a few garbage bags, even one garbage bag ...

... continued the planning. Eva was correct: Tibet was back on our schedule. There could be countless pages devoted to describing to the reader each city we visited and the well known historical sites of each one. To see the name "Beijing" the reader immediately pictures Tianamen Square, The Forbidden City, The Great Wall, and Chairman Mao Lying in state. Chongquing, another of China's enormous cities, with it Giant Pandas, home of the famous Chinese dish Hot ...

... It took us twenty to twentyfive minutes to get from the train station to our hotel by taxi as alot of the roads that were closed off to traffic for the olympics were still closed. We later realised that the train station is around a twenty minute walk from our hotel so we really went all over the city to get to it. Our hotel is lovely and so cheap in comparison to what you would pay for a four star hotel in Ireland. Most of the staff speak English so it is alot ...

... women's 3m diving preliminaries. Very cool stuff, although there were a total of about 10 unique dives performed out of 5 rounds of the 30 athletes. Also, I've found my next calling: judging diving. I was doing a little judging after each dive, and then seeing how my scores compared to the judges' ones. 9 times out of 10, I was spot on. Well, the schedule says water polo happens early tomorrow morning, so I'm off to bed. Until next time...

... this is from memory) and there are many side buildings where either the Concubines or wives lived. There is also major renovation going on so not every area was open to the public. Go to picturetrail dot com to see our pictures. I quickly ran out of film, but fortunally Yuccai had his wonderful camera and these first ones are the ones you are seeing. We walked from one end to the other ...

... the heavy snowfall blocking the trains and lack of power delaying them by up to six days, as well as the news reports of half a million people being trapped inside just one railway station further south! No thank you!!! China Airways here we come! Thats booked for the 7th and so New Year will be spent with our genuine (they actually like us - we think!) Chinese friends, eating a huge traditional meal and watching the fireworks! AWESOME!!!!!

... as good as the wall and we got to the same restaurant as the previous night ordering the same food. We go to a bar called the 10 RMB bar which does exactly as it states selling all drinks for that price about 80p. We start off with beer but move quickly onto cocktails and meet an Australian guy called Steve who's just moved to Beijing, we leave the bar drunk for 7 pounds finishing off an amazing day.

... bottom - and they had her shirt there too - so she was not happy. But they were still each under 5 bucks, so it wasn't a huge deal. My shirt is a bunch of Chinese characters that say the legend of the dragon that came to this section of the wall to become a man himself. Thoroughly exhausted, we figured we were on our way home. No such luck. Our next stop was the government run tea house. We had no say in the matter, but fortunately it turned out to be a pretty cool stop. They sat ...

... and we were talked into going to see an art exhibition for student artists from Xi'an (we're going there this tuesday). It was a "free" exhibition and after the guy talked us through it all and explained everything, he asked us to help out his school blah blah blah blah blah, so we bought a nice painting off them. We got sucked in, we knew it, but as I said, at least they're nice about it and I think if we had of walked away without buying ...