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Beijing, China
39° 55' N 116° 23' E
Sep 08, 2005 05:14
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The Forbidden City fuck up...

Text written in: English

We are starting to get into a pretty crap routine of going to bed rediculously late and waking up at midday every day.  Well, today was no different from this routine.  We woke up at midday and decided to go to the Forbidden City as we had heard great things (mainly from the guide book) about the place.

Beforehand though, we needed to sort out our train tickets to Xi'an for two days time if were to have any chance of getting beds on the train.  Luckily we managed to get hard sleepers, which cost about eighteen pounds for a 12 hour journey, then it was off to the Forbidden City.

The city is surrounded by a 30ft wall and a moat, and inside it contains a series of temples and pagodas dating back hundreds and hundreds of years.  We payed our 4 quid to get in only to be faced by shit loads of scaffolding.  Why is it that everywhere i go, the main attractions seem to be covered in scaffolding?  well annoying!  Anyway, we decided to walk straight through the centre of the city to see the main temples, before turning back and heading down one side too see some of the smaller and more secluded temples.  I thought that the main temples were quite impressive even though one half of the whole place was covered in scaffolding because the place is being tarted up in time for the Olympics here in 3 years.  We kept on walking straight on until we actually managed to walk straight out of the front gates where we found out that we would have to pay the entrance fee again to go back in!!  Buggery bollocks...or something along them lines was our response!  Alex didnt seem to mind too much though, as he wasnt impressed by the place at all....i think he was just getting withdrawal symptoms after no beer for 12 hours.

We then trudged back up to Tian'anmen Square where we were acosted by about 3 different pairs of students who wanted to apparently just talk to us to practice their English.  But then each of the conversations went the same way and they wanted us to go to some art exhibition, but having already been to one and getting bored very quickly, we politely refused and attempted to get a taxi for about half an hour unsuccessfully before going for a spot of retail therapy in Wanfujing (the main shopping street).  We didnt actually buy anything, but we did see a formula one car and found a camera repair shop who claimed they didnt know how to clean the inside of my camera!?!  We also tried and failed to find an english language bookstore that was in the lonely planet guide but didnt actually seem to exist.

We headed briefly through a small market, but everyone started grabbing our arms and pulling us towards their stalls, which got really annoying, so we turned back within a matter of minutes after Alex had paid about a million pounds for a deck of souvenir cards.

Later that night we headed back to the Den to watch the start of the final Ashes test match and a few sly shandies.  But for once, we made it to bed around about midnight as we had to be up rediculously early to go to Simitai and view the great wall in the morning.