Beijing seems like an age away now that i'm back at school. But with the return of Clare and Joe from the second leg of their Summer holiday in Vietnam, I've had the chance to look through the pictures Joe took on his lovely new camera, and I couldn't help but laugh to myself about them. Here they some of the best bits of Beijing...
The looong wait for cocktails at the hostel after the ordeal of trying to order, and then a bird pooing on me while the wait continued. I guess it's supposed to symbolise good luck though!
Doing band poses on The Great Wall of China, plus our failed attempt at doing the Korean style heart. I need to master this before I leave Korea. This also reminded me about how we lucked out by ignoring the advice from our parents to never get in cars with strangers. We'd asked someone at the bus station if it was the right bus to go to the Great Wall. He told us yes and said he would give us a shout when we were there. We got there, and he got off with us, thinking that as he was a bus attendant that he would probably point us in the right direction and then hop on the next bus that came along, but we were wrong. He lead us to a car and offered us a ridiclously cheap price to take us there and back. We took our chances and piled into the small car. He waited while we climbed the wall, and when the hungry explorers reached the bottom, he took us to a delicious restaurant. The only downside was that he did NOT approve of my sparkly Toms.
Continuing the cheesy poses throughout Beijing, this is in the park behind the Forbidden City, which we visited twice as the first day we didn't get there until after it closed. Whoops. If you wanted photos you had to be quick about it, we asked one lady to take a photo of us, which she did, but then asked if she could take another on her phone, with her son in the photo. That was fine, apart from then we learnt what the Disney Princesses in The Magic Kingdom must feel like because a long line of kids waiting for their pictures to be taken with us would form.
I developed a love for the street food in Beijing. Tasty bread and BBQ'd meat for so cheap. My love wasn't quite as deep for it as Joe's though! One drunk night I watched Joe and Fred devour at least 20 BBQ hearts on sticks.
I always have been and always will be terrible at flat face, I can hardly ever look serious! This started a trend of lots of middle aged Chinese folk asking us to take their picture in the same pose!
And this is how we really looked when we didn't realise the cameras were rolling! This caused Joe to scold us and then Kat devising the evil plan to sabotage his photos and pull a miserable face at the last second. He was NOT impressed.
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