Wednesday, 7th November, 2007 - Beijing: Bai Yu, The Forbiden City & Tian'anmen Square

As I write this, it is 9.20 on Friday morning and my flight departs at 2.20pm; so I will leave any detailed commentary until I'm back home. Except for this: Shuai had kindly contacted her friends, Shelly (with whom she was at university in Hull) and her husband Gerry (who studied at Sunderland university). They live in Beijing, and she thought it would be nice if they were free to show me around. As it happened, they were to be busy at work, but Shelly's younger sister, Bai Yu, bravely stepped into the breech. Although her English is at about the same level as my Chinese, she was very keen to accompany me around the City and to the Great Wall. Here she is:



As my friend Graham might say: "Lovely girl"! How could I possibly refuse? Now you may wonder what exactly it is I have, that enables me to keep landing on my feet like this: wisdom, maturity and charisma I reckon. (Hah!)

By the way, you'll notice the virtually-compulsory peace-sign that keeps appearing on photos of my friends in China. I'm not sure why they always do it. It's probably regarded as "cool". Nice, anyway.

Wind back to "today" (ie Wednesday 7th): we visited the The Royal Palace Museum (The Forbidden City) and Tian'anmen Square. I then treated us to Beijing Duck - cheap at three-times the price.

Anyway, for now, I leave you with some of the photos I (we) took.





































Bye for now.
M