China
Beijing
On September 17th, we arrived in Beijing. After a day of relaxing we went to the Forbidden City & The Temple of Heaven (ofcourse). For Joost it was his first time in Beijing. As most of you know I was in Beijing for 6 months in 1997. Al lot has changed since. Even the Forbidden City now has a Starbucks inside, unbelievable! But it is still recognisable and even a few of the pubs are still there!
Beijing is HUGE, so we decided to rent bikes en risk our lives doing "a Blockbuster Bike Tour", accoriding to the Lonely Planet. Here are the tafficrules in China: You either stop or keep going, ignoring all trafficlights and "human traffic lights" (people with a hat, a flag and a wistle, trying to organise traffic...). Right, more hidden unemployement I'd say...
In all my time in Beijing I NEVER visited the mausoleum of Mao. So, I promised myself to go this time. Good thing: it is problably the only free "sight" you can visit. But is he real or wax?? We still wonder...Total amount of time for this sight: 3 minutes, because you line up, and while you are wondering why the line is moving up so quickly, you're already in the first hall, where you can leave flowers (which go straight back to the woman selling them, we reckon) and before you've blinked, you're in the second room, now almost at running pase, passing Mao..This problably to prevent you from trying to figure out if he's the real thing... 
We took our time in Beijing, also because Joost didn't feel well for a few days. We visited the Lama Temple, which is a very impressive Buddist temple and also a Taoist Temple, which was a bit morbid, with departments of hell, death, 15 ways to die and so on. Have a look at the pictures to see what the departments look like...(Dongyue Miao)
We spent our last two days visiting what we thought were the highlights of Beijing (excluding the fabulous food): The Summer Palace and ofcourse The Great Wall. The Summer Palace used to be the emperor's summer house and it is a great place to rent a small boat and go onto the lake.
And last but not least: The Great Wall. We booked a tour that would drop us of 4 hours (walking) away from Simatai. It was a great hike! The wall hasn't been restored everywhere, so we had to do a bit of climbing sometimes, but that made it the best experience we had visiting the wall. See the pictures and judge for yourself!
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