Day 4: 9.57
On the subway to the summer palace now! Just attempted the tomb of chairman Mao but got turned away because I was wearing flip flops! Hopefully we will be ok for the palace... If not, new shoes! :) haha . We were actually pretty glad when we didn't get in because we turned the corner and saw the massive queue! Never seen anything like it. It's quite a big deal for the Chinese people, but to be honest I guess there wasn't much point in us going to see the body of a dead guy we don't even know much about...

So yesterday! Early start again, had a typical Chinese breakfast at 7:30... This is definitely one place where the food falls down haha. It was dim sum I think, Little parcels of meat and vegetables with "porridge" for some people (skipping that was one of my wiser decisions) which was essentially rice in water. There was also a fried pastry thing that was alright but not the nicest thing in the world! I think I'll stick to my own idea of breakfast from now on haha.

After breakfast we went to Tian'anmen square where the assembly building is, there is also the national museum of china, a monument, and the tomb of chairman Mao. It is a huge square, filled with Chinese tourists! Pretty cool though. Across the road from that is the forbidden city! This is where the emperor used to live, and there is 9999 rooms! Enough to deal with up to 3000. Concubines!! It was seriously massive, took hours to walk through. Impressive though! The gardens were really pretty. Then Jenny took us through some hutongs to experience "old Beijing" - basically where the normal? Slightly poorer people live. It was quite interesting, pretty run down though - glad I don't live there! After the hutongs we went to shicha hai, which is a big are around a lake which Jenny said was the "romantic" part of the city. It was very pretty! We had lunch there which was yummy as usual.

After walking around a bit Jenny left us and I went to the "birds nest" (the Olympic stadium) with Sarah Claire and Deborah. It was really cool, another massive building - everything is huge here! Then I went for a walk around the shopping streets on my own for a while for a bit of a break.

We went to a nice restaurant in a hotel or dinner, and had Peking duck (among other things). It was really really nice. We also tried rice wine which was 42percent... Mental! Kinda just tasted like a spirit, and you drank it like one.
After dinner we went to the night Market! That's where you get all the crazy food like scorpions/seahorses/starfish on sticks! It was really cool to see but I couldn't bring myself to eat anything haha.
Very eventful day!

Xxx