slide across the lake, no surprise Rob was first on the thing but I chose to wander down with Carla and we met the others in the Lonely Planet café, (they didn’t waste much time in opening a café) and guess what it was full of westerners, Greg had suggested meeting there but personally I would have preferred to have used a local place - but hey hum!

The next day was our visit to Tiananmen square, I’m not sure whether the rest of the group had visited it or not but we had made it there on our first night! There was the chance to go and see Chairman Mao in his mausoleum but we declined the offer, not really into seeing dead ex-commie leaders! So we made our own way to the Forbidden City, the home of the emperors for 500 years, local Chinese people were forbidden from approaching the Imperial Palace but my god they sure are making up for lost time! It was heaving, we had to laugh as we

approached the temple of peace and harmony - peace and bloody harmony oh I yeah - (these temples are closed off so you can only look through the doors) it was a proper free for all to get anywhere near to the door, there was nothing either peaceful or harmonious about the whole affair - the emperors would turn in there grave if they could see how there palaces were now being used! After battling our way round most of the audio tour with Roger Moore on the commentary we were in desperate need to some peace and quite, so we sacked off the audio and got off the well beaten track and to our delight we found a square with not a soul in it - ah bliss! We then realised that time was ticking by and we were both in need of a couple more t-shirts due to how hot and sweaty you can get, so we made our way to the shopping street, of course after battling our way through the endless amounts of people who want to sell you stuff! The best way we found to get them to leave us alone was to give them a big smile and say thank you,