Hello!

First of all, the photo attached to this blog is NOT China, although it would be nice!

So we last blogged in Chengde, where the temples and park were stunningly beautiful, with mountains all around. From there we caught our second lovely hard seat, 6 hour train back to Beijing, in preparation for our tour. Before that we managed to visit the Lamaist temple Yonghe Gong and Confucius Temple. The first is a big deal for the Chinese, although the way they lit huge numbers of incense sticks and bowed in front of every statue didn't quite come across as pious, more an exercise in ticking boxes. Confucius Temple was by contrast almost empty and a much more peaceful place to wander.

That evening we met a (former) work colleague of mine, Sam, in Tian'anmen Square and went for a fantastic Beijing duck meal nearby. Very strange to see someone from home in such a foreign place but great to catch up on our respective journeys.

The next day, the 16th, we started our tour but had a free day so went to the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall and some other sights.The Memorial Hall/Mausoleum was an interesting experience for watching the spectacle of the whole thing. Big queues, security checks, people buying flowers to deposit just steps later, and a small room in a very big building with Mao's body inside, followed immediately by the gift shop. Not a great building to have in the middle of Tian'anmen Square and I think we'll join to queue of Chinese in not liking it much. Later that day we went to a music shop and I purchased a traditional Chinese instrument, an erhu, which has now been posted home (mum look out for it in about 3/4 months!) and will be an interesting addition to my weird and wonderful instrument collection. That evening we went out for dinner with our tour group and got to know everyone, which was great fun and they're all a good bunch, who we'll be with most of them through to Hong Kong.

The next day we did the Summer Palace just in the north of Beijing, where Emperors would spend their holidays and is supposed to an exceptionally beautiful place. We didn't find it all that stunning, except that the massive lake in the middle of the place was completely frozen with lots of black dot people wandering across it. Most of the things we'd seen in Chengde seemed to us much more beautiful, and far less touristed. We went back to town to watch the sunset over the Forbidden City from Jingshan Park, immediately north of it, and went out for a yin-yang style hotpot meal with our tour leader.

The 18th was our hike between the Jinshanling and Simatai sections of the Great Wall and it was jaw-dropping. The skies were relatively clear (due to a happy absence of the Beijing smog) and as it's a less-visited part of the wall, we pretty much had it to ourselves! There are some villagers who live near the wall who individually follow tour group members for an hour or two, helping them up steps and talking a bit about the scenery. These strange people assigned themselves to each one of us and even though it was all a ploy to get us to buy something from them when they left, their presence added an extra interesting spin on the experience. We snaked our way around for about 4 hours and have some great photos of that beautiful day.

The following day we basically did the Forbidden City, but as the tour had to leave the hotel at 2pm for our onward train, we had a short time there which was a real shame. Have seen quite a few temples already, the properly titled Imperial Palace was clearly a cut above everything else. The painting had been redone for the Olympics in 2008 but as a Unesco site, this has all been done with more or less original materials, which made me feel better about it, and like it was a true representation of what it used to look like. We only really had time to wander through the main central part, and greatly missed wandering the more empty parts around the sides. So we're already talking of a return trip! But it was time to move on from Beijing and we got a sleeper train to Xi'an, where we are now.

Xi'an is a fairly interesting city, mostly because its people are more relaxed and friendly than in Beijing, and I think the whole group has enjoyed that. We did the Terracotta Warriors yesterday morning and found it a little underwhelming unfortunately. The gray clay figures could only be interesting for so long as you can't get very close to the individual statues in the well-known photo pit full of them. When we got right up close to some others in glass cases it did open up plenty more appreciation, and imagining the bright colours they would have been decked in helped make the achievement more impressive. The really amazing thing about it all is of course the technology they used to create them, metallurgy, mechanisms and casting processes that were in some cases 2000 years 'ahead of their time'.

Otherwise in Xi'an, we've left our swanky hotel to see the bell and drum towers, with a little traditional performance in each one; the Great Mosque, a sublimely tranquil place in the bustling Muslim Quarter with Islamic chants echoing around elderly pagodas and gates; for a barbecue street dinner last night with the spiciness ringing round our mouths; and today riding around the complete city wall on tandems and seeing the Great Wild Goose Pagoda south of the walls.

The best fun here was probably the bike ride, and it feels like we've done (in a mere 36 hours!) most of the stuff to do in Xi'an. The impression is that it's more liberal than Beijing, and has embraced modernity in a more traditionally Chinese way, with many buildings seeming a good melding of modern and traditional Chinese architecture.

Tonight we board another overnight train to Nanjing, where a lot of horrible things happened so will be a rather sombre few days there we think.

Anyway, I know this has been very long but it's good to have time to write a proper account of what we've been doing. If you're sitting at your desk at lunch time I'm sorry for taking up all of your allocated time. Mum, if you were going to be watching Eastenders then I'm glad you stuck with us!

Still waiting for a better connection speed to get some photos uploaded. But trust me for now it's beautiful!

Lots of love,

Dave and Isey
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