Beijing, China, Day One

Being the great explorers that we are our first day in China was spent getting to know the vast malls that surround our hotel. I know I know but in our defence we are going to be doing a whole lot of sightseeing over the next 3 weeks and it was nice to have a day chilling with Ma. We picked up some absolute bargains, matching kitten soft floral leggings at £1.50 each, a £5 pair of jeans after Ma accidentally brought over J’s instead of mine, a new £1 micro fibre hair towel after I left mine in a hotel somewhere along the way and a few other bits and pieces. Ma and I confess to being as yet unreformed shopping addicts and while we fed our habit J stayed at the hotel enjoying a nice relaxing morning without us 🙂

We’ve only been here 36 hours so far and I’m not in the least bit embarrassed to say I’m missing the internet, all that information previously at my fingertips, now no longer there. My day would usually start and end with a read of the latest world news then a look at Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, what can I say, I’m a social creature in a digital world. I like seeing my friends and what they’re up to, especially as we’re so far away. We can’t even google where the closest pharmacy is, or the nearest ATM or find out if certain browsers work better than others because I would first need a working browser to do that. I’ve seemingly by accident managed to post 1 photo but don’t want to frustrate myself trying to post more and thankfully wordpress seems to have no problem. I’ll be interested to see if I lose the urge or if the need to connect grows ever stronger as the weeks pass.

Ours were the only non Chinese faces we saw all day outside of our hotel today which seems bizarre for a capital city, I thought it would be far more multi cultural. We’ve also discovered hardly anyone speaks English still but of course why should they. Through smiling, pointing and miming we’ve managed to find everything we’ve needed so far and from tomorrow we’ll be in the capable hands of our tour guide for the majority of the time, thankfully.

We met the rest of our group this evening at our tour orientation meeting, there are 14 of us in total, who except for 4 women who were late and then chose not to join the rest of us, (unsociable much) went to a Chinese restaurant for a fabulous dinner. The 10 of us at dinner were made up of 3 Canadians, 4 Brits, 1 Norwegian, 1 Australian and 1 German, an eclectic group who seem like they’ll be great company over the next few weeks, I’m reserving judgement on the missing 4.

Tomorrow we start exploring for real with the Great Wall, I’ll let you know how it goes Xx