Seeing as I’d been sat down for roughly 35 hours previously, I decided to take a walk on my first day in Beijing. I just headed off into what I vaguely remembered Adrian saying was the centre of town, and soon came across this.

It’s the Forbidden City – so called because it used to be shut off to the ordinary citizens. And me – as it was past 4pm, I wasn’t allowed in. Hmph. Saw some guards running around though.

Yesterday I guffawed into the pus-capped heads of my rapidly expanding foot blisters and walked for at least 15 miles around the centre area of Beijing.
As anyone would, I chose to start my day by having a look at a preserved corpse.
Tiananmen Square is the world’s largest public square, and is more akin to the Sahara than its Trafalgar counterpart. And its main attraction is the pickled body of Chairman Mao, who died in 1976.
No cameras allowed (as I found out after I had already queued for 20 minutes only to be marched to the locker room in front of around 1000 sniggering Chinese people), so no snaps of the stiff, I’m afraid. But all I’ll say is that I’ve seen more impressive efforts in Louis Tussourds (Google that, hilarious) – I’m not convinced.
Following that I went traipsing, and ended up at a mall that was half full of vendors selling wholesale hairdressing supplies, and half full of those selling restaurant supplies. Pretty interesting, but I didn’t need much from either, so I went to the Temple Of Heaven Park.
The vast, tranquil park houses the temple itself, born of the Ming dynasty, and is as spectacular as it is relaxing.


We hit Mix, a nightclub in the evening, where Kentaro was DJing. He was a little deck-demon, but the dude that followed him insisted on playing the kind of insipid r’n’b you see on large screens behind reception areas at B-grade media companies.

A fun night all the same – and it’s quite fun being two foot taller than everyone else on the dancefloor (apart from Toby, naturally).