Beijing

So COOOOLDDDD! I really should have forked out for some longjohns like everyone else was wearing, but I kept saying to myself, it's only 3 days, then you won't need them in Australia and will just have to carry them around....blahblah. I should have just bought them because my legs are so sore now from the wind!! Well the first day I went to the Summer Palace with a German girl, and she was gleeful because all the signs around the Palace grounds kept informing us that "this temple was built in XXXX, but was destroyed by the Anglo-French alliance in the war" everything was destroyed by the Anglo-French! And nothing by the Germans. So she was pleased. It must be horrible to be best reknowned for being Jew-killing warmongers. She said she told a taxi driver in Beijing where she was from and he responded with, "Ah! Heil Hitler!" Whereas I get, "Ah Manchester United!" which isn't so bad is it, even if you're a ManCity fan. No one even mentions Iraq. Getting to the Palace and back from it was a big fiasco, as we hadn't found out the bus no, and the map was definitely NOT to scale, as it took us about an hour to walk what looked like 500 metres on the map. And no one around spoke English of course. I was expecting more people to speak English in Beijing though. So we ended up getting squashed on a busy bus going the very long way round to get back to our hostel, for a long time. The summer palace was really picturesque though, and it was good that we got there late, as we got to catch the sun going down, which made for good photos!

On my second day I went to the Forbidden City by myself. Its pretty huge - I was in there for about 5 hours wondering around the small rooms full of military gear, the concubines' living quarters, various art displays, a garden of ancient gnarled trees, and old musical instruments. The vast majority of it all very grey and sober...and sobering I suppose, to think of all that has happened there over the years. The highlight for me was when 3 Chinese boys came up and asked if they could have their photos taken with me tee hee! Everyone else at the hostel had been talking about how they'd been asked for their photos and I was beginning to worry that I was too much of an ugly tourist to be photographed, but then these boys on their holidays who didn't speak any English came up to me and so I wasn't worried anymore. The things I worry about are a bit silly aren't they. It didn't cross my mind about being mugged or pickpocketed!

After the Fobidden City I went along the the Pearl Market, which is a good place to go not just for cheap pearls, but also cheap ipods and phones and blenders and clothes and shoes and allsorts. However I stayed about 10 minutes and had to run away because there were about 20 salespeople to a customer, and they all kept grabbing me by the arm and pulling me to their stalls saying, "Buy this!" "You like?" "I give you special price!" Special price my arse.

The best of all for me was walking along the Great Wall. I hadn't been that excited about it beforehand, it was just the final "must-do" thing on my trip, but as we approached on the bus, we all started "oohing" and "aahing" at the size and beauty of it. Then we started walking along it, and we were amazed at it. It was the most perfect day weatherwise - all clear skies and not much wind, and we met maybe only 10 other people the whole 10km of wall we walked. (That doesn't include the mildly annoying touts trying to sell us books and drinks along the way, and following us in case we changed our minds, but they weren't too pushy). We walked from Jinshanling to Simatai - think its one of the furthest bits of wall around Beijing, it took us about 3 hours by bus. Part of it is rebuilt, but other parts are really falling apart, and its so steep in some places - a 70% incline! So apart from the possibility of being attacked by Mongolians it was quite a perilous climb. At the end I took the quick way down on the "flying fox" wire - a lovely slide down over a half-frozen river. Then at the "bus station" we found there were no buses. It was just getting dark, and we realised that we might be stuck and the great wall for longer than intended. Fortunately a guy was going into town in his minibus and he charged only 3 times the normal price to get back. All very much worth it though.