We woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed after our first night's sleep in Beijing. Seven of us girls were sharing a room with a random Chinese girl in the hostel next to the bar, so we had good access to wifi, although we were disappointed with the Great Fire Wall of China, which meant that most sites at home were blocked. Today, we were scheduled for a Chinese cooking class followed by a scavenger hunt around the hu tong district. We headed out with Alicia to catch a bus which took us through a maze of small alleyways and finally into a house with a courtyard and massive table covered with cooking implements. Cooking was hilarious fun. We made gong bao chicken and stir-fry noodles. I have to admit that I used a little more water than the recipe said, which made my dough look the best (even the teacher commented on the fine consistency of my dough) but I paid for it later. They turned out to be delicious and we ate them debating proxy servers, throwing plastic bottles to the family dog (it's all he would play fetch with, and he quite seemed to enjoy it) and discussing the Sims. We met the second half of the volunteers and then headed back to the hostel to begin the scavenger hunt. Beth and I started out in good spirits, buying some milky yoghurt and ice tea, trying to find the local police station and wandering round a model train shop. In the end, Beth and I gave up and went shopping down a little hipster Asian alleyway into small boutiques. Returning back to the hostel to chill out and get ready for later on.

That evening we hopped on the bus for a long trip to visit the great wall. Being gap yar worldly travellers Project Trust had decided not to send us to the tourist section of the wall about 40 minutes out from Beijing, but to an illegal, somewhat decrepit section. We were taken to a lodge in a small village, it was obviously a family home rented out by its owners who tended to our needs concerning food. We were served dinner and Nold and Beth were both brave enough to try the eyes of the fish that we were dining on. The procurement of bijou (about 42% rice wine) and tobacco pipes from the streets of Beijing meant a little bit of a party that went on into the early hours. The girl's bed room was essentially a living room that had been half bricked up to make a long huge bed which had been covered with blankets. Beth immediately shot gunned it for us and dramatically ran through and belly flopped down on to it not realising that it was pretty much hard through and through (ouch, wince wince) painful, but hugely comical. After a drunken dilemma involving a heart broken teen and an early morning raucous we all headed to bed.