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So a 4.30am start took us to Hong Kong airport for our flight to Beijing. Yes, the tour will be in Chinese. Mandarin to be precise, not that it makes any difference to me. Although in my defence I can conjure up some of the most important phrases in the Mandarin language: (I am spelling the following phonetically as I have no idea how to spell them...good start Natalie, good start...) "Shey shey" - thank you; "Ni hao" - hello; and the piece-de-resistance "Gambai" - cheers!
After a fast food breakfast at the airport we ate a further breakfast on the plane, and on arrival at Beijing we were taken for another meal! All intentions regarding the diet are firmly out of the window! Following lunch we made our way to The Summer Palace, a beautiful collection of Chinese homes nestled amonst a gargantuous man-made park, and surrounded by a large lake on a similar scale. Apparently some female dominatrix empress had decided she wanted to spend all the country's money in the 19th century on her Summer Palace rather than fighting a rather important war at home. Unsurprisingly they lost the war, but on the upside they did have a rather pretty palace...for the summer! Obviously "they" being "her", and anyone else she should choose to live there...toy boys...etc.
Anyhow, afterwards we were made to watch some scary traditional Chinese 'freak' show involving a guy who could juggle axes, the same guy sho would knack a nail into a piece of wood with his fist, someone who could attach a bowl to his stomach, and another guy who could swallow swords and steel balls, and cough them up again (respectively).
Luckily we managed to escape and made our way to the shopping district in central Beijing. Not too different from Shanghai and Qingdao, so we decided to leave the shopping for when we were back in HK.
Then I made a terrible decision. I decided I needed a drink, and that drink would be an innocently sounding 'Lemon Boost' - ok, maybe on retrospect it did sound a little suspicious, but I was suffering from extreme thirst at the time and senses can be dampened in such conditions! It was just what I thought I needed. Having seen the barrista pour copious amounts of sugar, salt rather curiously, a banana, I still insisted on drinking the full hog and consequently felt rather sick!
Despite my nausea we made it to a rather well known duck restaurant that evening and enjoyed watching the chefs carve up freshly crispended whole ducks on trolleys. Unfortunately my appetite wasn't up to the challenge but the experience was worthwhile nonetheless.
On our way back to meet the tour group we took a detour to one of the scariest mall experiences I have ever had rather like Point Horror's "The Mall" (surely I'm not the only one to have read that?!). Think the Local Shop out of The League of Gentlemen crossed with a Chinese version of Pound Stretcher. We should have been weary by the plush yapping toy dragons at the entrance, but no, we descended into the depths of the mall, coaxed downwards by the escalators. However, when soon realising the mistake we'd made, there just wasn't a way out. The escalators led to dead ends, poorly lit and half built! Eventually we managed to find an exit, which led into a dark alleyway - nice.
After that episode we finally checked into our hotel. The magnificent Ritz-Carlton. The lobby was gorgeous and that was only the start. Our bedroom suite was massive, there was a hot-tub complete with TV screen in the bathroom, and rather generous 40 inch plasma in the main bedroom. This IS the life. Bring on the training contract and a life of luxury. The rest of the evening was spent at leisure, exploiting every available inch of our room...in a purely asexual non-lesbian sense of course boys!
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