Beijing!

We arrived here by sleeper train, planning on having 6 days of seeing the city and all its sights. Our first day brought a bit of a shock when we tried to get our Japanese visa and were told that the only way to do so was to return to SA! With our hearts in our feet we sat recovering on the pavement outside the embassy for a while, feeling really quite mad too as we'd tried to get the visa in SA from an agency and were not able to as the visa expires within 3 months, and had not been told this was the deal with the Japanese visa... It really put is on a bit of a downer for a few days as we'd really been looking forward to Japan, it had in fact been a hopeful highlight of our trip, and we had to spend the next 2 days sorting out admin related to this change in plans, such as changing our round the world ticket routing, and booking a ticket to Shanghai as we were not able to fly directly to Chicago.

After it was all sorted though, we squashed 6 days of sight seeing into 3 as best we could. We saw the Great Wall on the 22nd by doing a 10km walk between Jianshiling and Simitai, which was really amazing and enjoyable and lived up to expectations. On the 23d we visited the olympic buildings (bird's nest and water cube) and got a free bit of olympic spirit with our over-priced cokes while listening to "one world, one dream" still playing out the olympic speakers. And on our last day in Beijing we saw the Forbidden City (lovely until the crowds arrived - wow Beijing is so over-populated!) and the Summer Palace (figuring out the easy way to find the chinese tour groups-free paths: go uphill), residences of the emperor and empress in China's dynasty era.

We made friends with our dorm-mate, and we went to dinner together, getting our first and only perfectly customised chinese meal, at a non-tourist price, what fun!