Hello! Just a quick update on our first week or so (we should be able to put some photos of Beijing up today or tomorrow - If the German girl ever gets off the computer we need!!) Beijing was brilliant and massive, 20 million people live there so as you can guess its pretty busy. We got to see the forbidden city which was amazing and tianamen square, we also walked to the temple of heaven which was really good, we also got to eat Peking duck in Peking which was really nice, we also headed to some local parks and lakes around the city (all had pretty good beer gardens) we went to the great wall of china as well which is a pretty breathtaking place, although the steps up it were almost vertical in places, i dealt with it fine due to my SAS training but Kirsty struggled in places,It also rained the day we went to the great wall so we're wearing pretty dashing rain poncho things in most of our pictures there. We did get a Hero card for making it to the top though, which again has a picture of us wearing pink and blue ponchos (kirsty was wearing the pink poncho by the way) . We lost a day in Beijing after we had a few to many the night before, we ended up involved in some drinking game with some europeans in our hostel, i had no ideas of the rules and seemed to lose every time, we battled on with it till about 4am but the place ran out of beer, i went looking for some more with a German lad but we accidently ended up walking into some ones front room where they were having a pretty intense looking game of poker. We just backed out of there slowly!

Anyway we're in Xi'an now which is a pretty cool city, its over 3000 years old and used to be a major point on the silk route between europe and asia. Its also where the terra-cotta warriors are so we're getting the bus out there tomorrow to see them which should be good (we were meant to go today but we were up late in the bar with some other folk from our hostel, first beer was free and it had a dart board...Good times) then tomorrow night we're on the over night train to Shanghi (althought we might stop some where on the way)

Will try to get the pics up as soon as pos!