Around the World Trip - Day 15 - 16th Jan 2009 – Onboard and arrival in Beijing.

Got up at 8am as the views were supposed to be nice as we go through China. All we saw was lots of mountains from the train and lots of poor areas with run down houses and rubbish tips. As we pulled into Beijing there were lots of power stations and large chimneys, it looks very industrial. As we pulled up in the station it was packed so we waited on the train until everyone had got off so that we wouldn’t get trampled in the rush. We bumped into Dutch Peter in the station and told him that we would email him as we are going out for a meal tomorrow with the rest of the guys.

The hotel was ideal as it was located just across the road and was only 2 minutes walk from the station. Check in to the hotel was really quick and we got to our room but then discovered that there was no internet in the room. The woman tried to palm us off with the business centre on the 2nd floor but we told her we booked it as it said it had in room internet. She then changed us to a 7th floor room with internet in the room.

Got to the room and ate yet another of the packs of dried noodles we had packed to lighten our luggage. We bagged all the hotel toiletries so that we could use the ones we brought with us and keep them for a souvenir.

After we had got settled we went for a walk around the area that the hotel was in. There are lots of little side street food places where it looks like local eat. Went to the supermarkets to see what prices were like and it seems really cheap. I thought we were working the prices out wrong as I bought a big pot noodle with a sausage, a packet of dried squid and two things that we weren’t sure what they were. They were called PU so we only bought them cos it sounded funny saying you were eating POO LOL. They turned out to be kind of fruit roll type things that kids eat. They were nice though so I will probably bring a couple home.

Ate dinner and then tried to organise my pics on my laptop as me and Phil have duplicated quite a lot so needed to remove some of them to make uploading them onto facebook quicker.