We've had a busy few days looking around Beijing. We went to the bird's nest olympic stadium. It was very impressive although hard to see against the grey sky. Nishal enjoyed his chance to stand on the track and pose as he won gold! We also found fame at the stadium with chinese asking to take photos with us! (and some more just taking with out asking).

We visited the tepmple of Heaven in the afternoon. We experienced our first big tropical storm with rivers on the pavements which almost washed Claire's shoe away! The storm cooled the weather down a lot and it has been sunny for 2 days and we can even see the sky!! We got out of the rain into a market with lots of cheap clothes and electronics (leave requests here lol). Later we visited the night market which was very interesting. There were scorpions, seahorses, starfish, grasshoppers on skewers alive and still wriggling! along with plenty of other 'delicacies' (photos to follow!).

Yesterday we took a 1hr (very hot) bus ride to the summer palace. This was a summer retreat of the emperors form the heat of Beijing aroung Kunming lake..still very popular with chinese today. The main attraction was the Hall of Buddah's Inscence and longevity hill. We were very lucky that the sky was still clear and there were amazing views of the city from the hill..we saw all the buildings we had only previously seen from the other end of the street! We also caught some of our chinese fans on camera! We are among very few foreign tourists even at the most popular tourist sights and most of these others seem to be American, french and german.

We are having a bit of a rest today and hopefully going to see acrobats in the evening. Tomorrow we hope to go to the Great wall.

P.S we don't currently seem to be able to reply to e-mails or messages on the message board (but we're still enjoying reading them!)