Arrived at Beijing airport in the afternoon, it was surprisingly quiet for being China! We got our overly large backpacks from baggage reclaim and saddled up. After attempting to buy tickets for the airport shuttle into town we soon realised that nobody speaks english in china...doh! Don't know why I expected them to. Anyway we succeeded in making it to the centre, hurrah! As we got off the bus we looked up and saw a procession of military planes swoop over Tiananmen square, it was quite bizarre and a bit alarming. We found the right metro stop and from there we had what we thought were crystal clear directions to our hostel. Instead we found ourselves wandering down the main shopping street of Beijing 'Wangfujing'. Since we were the only westerns about we were constantly given funny looks (or it could be the fact we were all carrying bags that were clearly twice the size of us). After a bit of a distressing start we found our hostel :) The bags were then dumped and we headed straight back to the shopping street. As we wandered down we found a side street which was very 'China town" looking, lots of souvenir shops and food stalls. Well being the shopaholic i ended up buying a lovely kimono. I managed to haggle the price down a lot, i got quite into the whole bartering thing! As we explored the market further we found more food stalls. These stalls were insane...seahorse on a stick, snake on a stick, sheeps penis on a stick and to top it all off...live scorpian on a stick, it was so gross to see all their tiny legs wiggling away, ewww! From what I saw they just dip the sticks into fried batter (and i thought deep fried mars bar was bad!). Feeling peckish (and not being tempted by the food at the market) we went in search of a restaurant. We found a place which had a menu with pictures on it, so, we tried the "point to the menu and hope for the best we had a never ending supply of jasmine tea.

Before we left the hostel the man who worked there told us to be back at 8pm, we didnt really understand him, we thought he was saying there was going to be a street party. In actual fact he was telling us o be back because they shut beijing down on a friday night to practice for the 60th anniversary of the peoples republic of china ceremony. Opps got that a bit wrong! So as we tried to walk back to our hostel after dinner we found the streets lined with soldiers. They wouldn't let us pass (which was very annoying since we were only one street away from home). After being stuck on a street corner for almost an hour (along with a handful of equally confused westerners) we decided to find an alternative route...which thankfully was successful. So that concluded my first day in China...and what a day it was!