Lovetown Travel Hotel (Beijing Baiwanzhuang)

La temperatura hoy en Beijing era 35 grados. Sofocante. Aun asi, conseguimos salir del hostal despues de desayunar/comer. La verdad es que deberiamos madrugar y despues echarnos una siesta, pero el tiempo pasa rapido por la noche, que es cuando mas fresquito se esta.

Cogimos el metro al Olympic Sports Centre, donde se podian visitar el Bird's Nest (el nido del pajaro), que es el estadio olimpico, y The Cube (el cubo), la ...

... complete circle we end up in a dark alley in front of a building with 5 China flags. Now the more flags a building has, the more important the building. It also had concertina wire around the top of a wall surrounding the building. And in case that did not deter you, there were shards of broken glass embedded in the concrete on top of the wall sticking up. We come to a gate and one guy suggest we jump it. Does the building I just described sound like one you ...

... us about two hours on the wall before we had to be back on the bus. Off the bus, we decided to head for the Bear Park first. Here, many black bears were on display in tradgically small inclosures, from which a rather pungent stench was whafting up. For 3Y you can toss a piece of apple at them, or for free you can watch them pace like mental patients or pant profusely, their long tongues lolling out of their heads in a distrubing ...

... structure is the Tower of the Fragrance of the Buddha which lies at the top of a central hill. You can easily spend a whole day here as there is just one site after the next and it would take hours to walk around the lake but we decided to take the dragon boat across the lake to save time. Besides the tower, one of the highlights was Suzhou Street which feels ...

... in digital fakery. In a further twist, Chinese Olympic organisers today admitted to deploying "cheer squads" to create atmosphere and disguise blocks of empty seats in the sports venues. The legions of spectators wearing matching yellow t-shirts and banging together oversized inflatable batons have been highly visible at the first sold-out Games. But Wang Wei, vice-president of the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee ...

... As I was leaving, I wanted to take a picture, but I guess that was not the area you were allowed to). He was polite, but stern. It is very interesting to stand out in a crowd. Had lots of "looks" from the crowd - especially when I was speaking English with my little friend. As I was departing, there were a couple of older women that came up to me and patted me on the shoulder, smiled, bowed and walked away. Have no idea what that was ...

... that they were for Beijing West. We had our written out request in characters. We got to the front and the guy told us that we needed to go to line 74 to get tickets to Xi'an. Line 74 was very long. It was very cold. We waited for over an hour and I got the chance to study the Chinese institution of standing in line. From a distance it really looks like Chinese people stand in line. As you get closer to the line (and closer to the ...

... lol. We got one called "Cream delight." Tiffany thought it sounded good... and although I don't think pizzas sound like they should be creamy in any way... I went for it. The pizzas don't have any tomato sauce on it, which I didn't even notice until Tiffany pointed it out. The pizza was really good... it has ham, mushrooms ...

Off at 8.30 for Tianamen Square. Fractionally less people but as a tip never visit China in the first week of May. Everyone is on holiday and they all want to visit the Forbidden City The Forbidden City was stunning except for the heat and the crowds. Yesterday they had 435,000 visitors, today more. Also much of it was being refurbished for ...

... all this means that Ti'anenmen Square on October 1st was only ever going to be one thing - rammed. It didn't disappoint and we were milling around taking it all in. I really didn't expect the locals to be so curious with us but we had people coming up wanting photos with us and their kids etc. It's not like we're the only westerners there either. But, it's a good vibe so we don't mind. After the square we went ...