Saturday, June 28, 2008

Out and about in Beijing

20/04/08
Out semi organised trip was now over and some people were leaving. Gail and John had already left. I still had a couple of days left. Slept in this morning. Had arranged to go to the Silk Market with Steve and John sometime before lunch time. I had to move rooms into a room by myself. Caught a taxi with no trouble and headed off to the markets. Again not what I expected. It was a four storied building full of fake goods. Fake Nike, fake Rolex, fake IPOD's, fake everything. The guys had a lot of fun bargaining on prices. Numerous times I became their wife to get rid of some of the sales girls. It was a lot of fun. We had pizza at a western type restaurant in the markets and paid 100Y for it (too much!). We stayed there until about 4pm when we went back to the hotel, grabbed they guys stuff and went to their new 5 star hotel. It was quite nice and the staff spoke English...now there's a first for this trip! Had a cup of tea with them and they came back to my hotel for a while to say good bye to some of the others. We hung around the 6th floor bar for the evening and then went to bed early. By this stage just about everyone had departed which was sad. Whitney and Dawn were still there as they were contemplating going to Mongolia and Neil was due to leave tomorrow at lunch time. For some reason I stopped taking pictures.