Wednesday 27th - day 7
Beijing

First day in Beijing and we venture to bei hai park first. It's a Massive lake with boats, surrounded by a decent few km of gardens. There's a few dance groups here, it's like a big exercise class, people meet up in a public place and all dance the same routine. It's a bright day - which is unusual for china so the parks busy.
After a walk right through, we end up by the forbidden city, we take the option to to up the gate house which overlooks tianamen square (30rmb and 3rmb for bag store - as you can't take any bags into the square).
There's a decent view from the gate house which overlooks the whole square. There's not much going on in the square apart from a few groups of tourists and food/dink stalls. There's a lot of staff here, at least 10 flanking the lookout part, not unusual in china for places to be overstated but it's obviously a high security area.
After the gatehouse we collect our bags and head through the gates on the opposite side into the forbidden city. The outer courtyard spans northwards for a good kilometre. There's series of gates and pavilions along the way, such as the gate of supreme harmony, hate of heavenly purity etc. A centre walkway runs trough the middle of the courtyard, which was apparently where the emperor would walk. This centre path, once it meets the pavilions is decorated with slabs of artwork, depicting dragons chasing pearls. There are also huge bronze Chinese lions lining the walkways. Further on in the city, is the inner court with 3 inner palaces icluding the 'hall of Union' which was as the throne room of for the Ming empress - during the Qing dynasty, the hall was used for animal sacrifice.
The pavilion walls and pillars are the typical red. You need to look up to appreciate the fabulous colours and art work - red, blue & green highly decorative ceilings, adjourned with golden dragons span over the entire space in each pavilion.
There are separate pavilions for prayers, sacrifices, ceremony's etc. at the north end of the city, just on from the inner palaces are the imperial gardens. It's hard to appreciate how grand they are, with the place bursting with tourists but there's huge rockeries, pavilions, circular archways, and hundreds of twisting accent trees.

As we exit the city at the north gate, we are directly facing jing Shan park which we walk through next. The main
pavilion here - wanchun pavilion - is situated at the top of a hill, so we make the 10 minute walk up. The view gives a good panoramic view of Beijing, with the forbidden city to the south, bei hai park to the west, and various other temples and landmarks to the north including the drum and bell tower and prince gongs mansion. In the distance of the north view are huge mountains which the Great Wall sprawls across . The hill was formed from the earth that was excavated when creating the forbidden city, and it's purpose was to protect the imperial palaces in the forbidden city from northern influences which brought death and distraction according to classical feng shui.
During the reign of the last Ming emperor, chongzhen - in 1664, rebels forced their way into Beijing, the emperor climbed the hill in the park and hung himself from a locust tree,
After the walk up to the top of jing Shan We make our way back to the hostel which is only a few stops. Once back in the dorm we get taking to a German girl Katherine and itay - a guy from isreal. Katherine is working here and itay has been travelling a while through china so we lap up the advice and tips from both of them. We all head out to wangfujing Street for the famous night markets there. It's really overpriced but we try some dumplings, a pork wrap thing and some pork rib type things. There's an abundance of skewered or deep fried bugs, seafood and other unappetising food including, scorpion, snake, something which resembled a rat, seahorse, squid, starfish. We all steer clear of anything too vile looking..Yasmin's looking green so we head back to the hostel. Itay explains that you should avoid any major tourist attractions on Fridays-Sundays if possible, so we book the mutianyu Great Wall trip for tomorrow on his advice. We pick the mutianyu rather than the badaling part of the wall as it's apparently much less touristy but still with great views.
He's also taking the trip but will go on a bus rather than the hostel your. We decided on the tour hoping to meet a few more people from the hostel .