Hi everyone from Beijing, the last stop on my travels! I fly home a week today in fact, it's hard to believe but I first have lots of exploring to do - the city is enormous and there is so much to see. So here's a speedy update on my past few days in China's capital!

I flew in from Shanghai on Sunday, another uniquely Chinese flight which swopped across the country, stopped beside a farm en route and was delayed 30 minutes for 'air traffic' in a field without a single other plane, and then landed in a grotty shed in the middle of nowhere somewhere near Beijing. I was lucky to catch the only bus into the city and tackled a heaving Metro train to a station near the hostel. It wasn't fun but my pack is a great tool for accidently bashing annoying Chinese. The hostel was full of unbearable Chinese so I moved on Monday morning to a great place just beside Tiananmen Square and set off to explore. The Square is amazing, the largest public square in the world with monuments in the centre, the gigantic iconic portrait of Mao at one end and low-rise Soviet-style buildings surrounding it. It is a surreal place and Beijing itself is China as I had imagined - far less Western than any other city with very little English. It is imposing, intimidating and tightly controlled. Tiananmen is ringed by perimeter fence, every entrance is marked by security checks, armed guards march up and down and plain-clothed police monitor the crowd for anyone brave enough to whip out a pro-Tibet flag (I daren't try for a Saints' shirt photo here). It's an interesting place to people watch from but fending off tea party and photo invitations is tiring. Above all, it is so evidently Communist - the symbolic centre of the Chinese universe and you get a real sense here of the brain-washed population.

I climbed up the Gate of Heavenly Peace, a national symbol overlooking the square, for some nice views although the smog is incredible, there is no sun and the visibility is so poor that you can't see the southern end of the Square. Inside the Gate were screens showing patriotic presentations celebrating communist events, images I'd more associate with North Korea. Beyond the Square things get slightly easier, I found a nice maze of hutongs (courtyard houses and alleyways), a fancy shopping street with the most non-Western Starbucks I have ever seen, and explored the Foreign Legation Quarter. Yesterday I spent the day at the Forbidden City, the heart of Beijing just North of Tiananmen. It was magnificent, jammed full of Chinese tour groups but huge enough to escape! I couldn't believe just how big it was - 800 buildings laid out in a perfect grid with huge palaces and great halls down the middle and courtyards, pavilions and mini-museums in a maze on either side, all with a wonderful array of long and imaginative names and inventive stories of past emperors and their wives -halls of purity, tranquility, harmony, longevity... I hired a fancy GPS audio-guide which was pretty cool, it saved trying to decript the English info panels but the cackle of Chinese often drowned it out. It was boiling hot and I got eaten alive by mozzies but the palace was stunning and a brilliant day out.

I set out to the Summer Palace today, a vast swathe of lakes, temples, pavilions, bridges and gate-towers out in the north-west of the city. I climbed up Longevity Hill to a range of pavilions, halls and buddhas, and a view out over a lake barely visible amid the smog. It's hard to describe just how thick it is. I was lucky to get an odd two hours of rambling about before the heavens opened and the stampede of sausage-spitting, corn-munching, umbrella-poking Chinese arrived. I fled to the Metro along the flooded pavements but knew my route so no disasters this time!

I have made a plan for my next few days and hope to get out to the Great Wall of Friday. Beijing is a very difficult place to understand and get about but it is immensely fascinating and the Communist regime is so apparent. I will keep you posted and fingers crossed for good weather up along the Great Wall!

Grace xx