China
We have arrived in China. I can’t access FB or Twitter, so there won’t be any updates on them for the next month or so. I had setup a youtube account too, which I was going to upload some videos to, but yet again it seems to be a blocked site, so I might have to do that when we get to Canada. We have had some technical issues, but we managed to get Geoff’s netbook connected in our room, so at least for this post (and the others that I will post to catchup to now) we have internet access.
So far we have found Beijing to be quite a nice city. It is quite smoggy & you can’t see very far as a result - forget trying to get city views from any sort of lookout, but it isn’t difficult to breathe. I actually found the air pollution in UB to be much worse, you can at least breathe the air here, perhaps you can’t see much, but at least it doesn’t stink & you can breathe fairly well.
We arrived Saturday afternoon at Beijing train station & we had planned to stay here until Thursday/ Friday, but we might stay a few more days. There is a cooking class that we are interested in doing with a place called Black Sesame Kitchen, but as yet we have not heard from them, so not sure what will happen there. It looks as though we might axe our 3 day Yangzi River cruise, there is severe flooding in the area due to a typhoon that hit a few days ago & it is only getting worse. If we cancel that then we will probably get rid of Chengdu too (where the pandas are). We have tried to cram in a little bit too much for the time that we have as it is, & there are always going to be things that you miss out on.
Today is a bit of a relaxing day, of sorts. My knee has been playing up & it is extremely sore to walk on at the moment, so we are going to do a few little things. We had planned to see the Forbidden City, but that is a full day walking & the other things that we want to see here, like the Summer Palace is Huge & the Great Wall isn’t much better for walking either, so we will get onto those things again tomorrow (don’t worry, not all at the same time). We have been thinking that we might try to get haircuts today, visit The Drum Tower & Bell Tower, & perhaps some theatre tonight, but our plans are pretty flexible.