Beijing

I like Beijing. While very few people speak English, it's a really nice place to be. I think it's because I found the food in Korea so hard to deal with and despite what anyone has said to me I found the food in China to be quite like the food in Chinese restaurants back home. We got in to Beijing airport quite a few hours later than we thought as we had been moved to a flight three hours later. We grabbed the subway to our hostel which involved getting all our stuff put through xray scanners again. Every time you use the subway or go into a park or historical site you have to go through a scanner or get searched. Weirdly about a quarter of the people working scanners seem to be asleep so I'm not sure that they actually check anything. We've also seen at least one shop assistant asleep too. Our hostel was a really nice about three stops from the Forbidden City. The beds were clean and made everyday and three times a week you got a free dinner which everyone got involved in making. We were exhausted from two six o'clock starts and a night out so we chilled out in the hostel the first night with a few beers only to awoken by an obnoxious Canadian at 6.30 in the morning. The guy was really loud and inconsiderate. In the four nights we stayed there he woke us up every morning. Once he even woke us up while outside the room on his phone. He also huffed and tutted the entire time people weren't talking to him. We tried to get to know him the first day but decided we didn't want to after the first night.