Hanna & Julia's Whirlwind Adventure: Beijing Sights

So our fast paced frantic guide turned up at our hotel an hour late (at our request) having already dropped half our group off at The Forbidden City, she literally made us run to Tienanmen Square, panting and spluttering we went in to see to see Mao. Another preserved body of a "great" communist leader. It's quite morbid because it meant that we have now seen Lenin's dead body in Moscow and Mao's in Beijing. It was really interesting to see all the flowers people had put outside his mausoleum, there were hundreds of white roses.

Tienanmen Tower

We met up with our group (the joys) and our guide took us to a tea house where we were taught all the different meanings of different types of tea, what they did and how to drink tea properly.

Tea Ceremony

We also climbed a rather large mountain to see some Pagoda's, this is where we got accosted by Chinese tourists because of our blonde hair, our first taste of the celebrity lifestyle we're still living. In asia natural blonde hair is very rare, therefore when they see us two (especially Julia) walking down the street they laugh, point, stare awstruck and ask us if they can take pictures with us...to put in their holiday albums. We're in so many Chinese holiday albums right now. Anyway can you imagine the crowd we drew when we decided to try on Chinese empress clothing on the top of the mountain with the highest Pagoda. It was hilarious, so many people flocked and took pictures of us...we were beautiful.

After our short exhibitionist antics we hopped in a cab which drove us to the summer palace. A really beautiful palace built by an emperor in one of the dynasty's (oh I've really listened to the facts). It was massive, seriously we walked around the grounds for about two and a half hours (maybe more) and we still didn't get to see all of it.

After three hours we were exhausted, and as if that wasn't enough people, took pictures of us in secret. They pretended to be taking pictures of something behind or in front of us, but actually it was us they were zooming in their lenses to. We ended up having to hide behind a pillar and avoid crowded places...we sympathise with celebrities now.