After a long train unadventurous train journey (I slept though the most exciting part the changing of the train Bogeys) I arrived in Beijing and pretty much was fleeced straight away by a taxi from the main train station to my hostel. Now I was told that taxi fares were cheap in China but I didn't really realise just how cheap particularly as the taxi driver tried to make me pay up front 280 Yuan (about £28) fortunately for me I refused but got in the taxi anyway as I was tired and I had made the fatal mistake of not writing down directions to the hostel correctly (which I later realised would have been two stops from Beijing train station to where my hostel was on the metro and would have only cost me 2 Yuan). Anyway after eventually getting there I managed to get away with paying the driver 100 Yuan, again over priced as most fares are around 10-20 Yuan, I just kept telling myself that had I been in London the fare would have been much higher!
As you can imagine this wasn't the best start to my trip to China but as I found out a couple of days later at least I wasn't as badly ripped off as one guy who I met on the train from Mongolia, he managed to find himself in the midst of a tea house scam around the Temple of Heaven Park and got fleeced for £160!

Ellie and Natalie, from my tour group in Mongolia, were due to be in Beijing for a few days whilst I was there so we had arranged to meet up for dinner and drinks on my first evening. The following day the three of us went to the Great Wall, luckily for us the weather was fantastic, gorgeous clear blue sky, and there were not too many tourists on the part of the wall we went to, Mutianyu. Unfortunately the only downside was the price of a "local" restaurant near the bottom, for the three of us lunch cost over 370 Yuan, the evening before I think we ate for around 100-120 Yuan including wine at a really nice restaurant. Needless to say Beijing was not endearing itself to me by this point!
Our Taxi driver also took us back to Beijing via the Olympic site, I just hope Stratford can live up to it!

Later that evening we met up with another two people from the Mongolia tour, Gen and Richard, who had finally managed to escape UB after flight delays due to bad weather.

By this point I decided that I needed to escape from Beijing, think of London and multiply it by ten in terms of size and tourists (lots of pushing in going on so my London self came out in terms of pushing in at gates and on the metro), oh and before I forget the stiff-ling weather. I went back to Beijing train station and queued for about half an hour at the foreigners window and found that I couldn't get a sleeper or seated train ticket out of Beijing to either Xian or Chengdu for love nor money until August 25th at the earliest! arghh......... (they only had standing tickets available - Beijing to Xian 11.5 hours). So instead of making a decision I decided to do some site seeing and went to the Temple of Heaven Park, which incidently was lovely and picturesque but over run with tourists.

After procrastinating about where I wanted to go and when (I have now learned my lesson to plan things a little better in advance) I finally booked an expensive(ish) flight out of Beijing to Xian so that I could see the Terracotta Warriors. Afterwards I admit that I felt better and more relaxed and stared to actually "like" Beijing more.

Whilst in Beijing I also visited the Forbidden City (I lasted 3 hours compared to most people's 2 hours there!), again very very busy, the Summer Palace (much much nicer!), Tiananmen Sq (didn't get up early enough to see Mao), Zhongshan Park and the Llama Temple.

All in all I wasn't bowled over by Beijing, it was too much for me, its a crazy funny old place and is more capitalist than communist in the way that life goes on there, though saying that there is CCTV everywhere, and police/soldiers all over the place so you do feel like you are being constantly watched. I think it was just a bit much for me after spending all that time in Mongolia.

Anyway, I had my escape route and boy was I pleased to leave!