Yesterday we arrived in Beijing to sunny skies and temperatures of 20 degrees, after driving from Galway to Dublin, taking a flight to Heathrow, then the 9 hour flight to Beijing, then a train then taxi to our hostel – Santilun Youth Hostel.

The staff here are really nice, and so far we have only tried one thing from their menu but it was amazing French toast. The shower leaves little to be desired (pressure) but we have a great king bed with lots of sunlight.

I seem to not be doing too well on planes lately, I got that same feeling like I was going to faint but handled it better this time, but not before getting covered in sweat, turning green and getting the chills. Looks like my potential career idea of being a flight attendant is out the window. I got a suggestion of finding Chinese smelling salts which I’m going to try to do, if anyone else has ideas I’d love to hear them.

Yesterday night we went out for our one fancy dinner and it was for Peking Duck. At Beijing Dadong Roast Duck Restaurant they bring out the whole duck for you and carve it in front of u and serve it with all little condiments (like garlic paste, cucumber, onion, and sugar) and u wrap the duck in little pancake things. To give an idea it was $40 for the whole thing along with bottles of water and it was a fancy place.

The time zones are starting to screw with us. We went to bed last night at 11 absolutely exhausted and woke up around 2 unable to fall back asleep. Sometime after 4 we did manage to get back to sleep, but we slept until 2.

Today we tackled the Beijing Subway system which is quite easy to understand. Most things in Beijing so far are very easy to understand because everything is accompanied by English. We don’t know if it was like this before the Olympics last year, but it’s good for us.

Our first stop was for Tiananmen Square to see Mao. This week is the 60th anniversary of communist China (see first picture), so all the subway stops around Tiananmen were closed, so after walking over an hour (half the time in the wrong way) we got there but couldn’t go into the square. It is very busy here!

We then had about an hour to journey to the Donghuamen Night Market. This was originally set up for tourists but we saw a larger percentage of Chinese than Westerners.

Here Nick put his ‘bugs are delicious’ theory back to the test and it passed, this time with scorpions! I could barely watch as he pulled them off the stick with a smile.