Jakey Jake

Sunday 23rd May
Today we arrived in Beijing at 1pm, the food on that train had been excellent, i really like my scrambled eggs with tomato We caught Taxis from the train station to our hotel, the rainbow hotel. When we arrived we thought we were in heaven, unfortunately the hotel has a good part and a bad part, and guess where we arrived?? and guess where we were staying??? The redeeming feature of this place was that the good part had an AMF bowling alley in it, so i got in some bowling, though never breaking 150 This afternoon we visited Tiannamen Square, its pretty big and its difficult to imagine all those tanks rolling over those poor protestors there. Wonder how long it took them to scrub the blood off the pavement?? now there are just a bunch of tourists (mostly chinese) and people flying kites and people selling junk. No sign of the massacre. Across the road is the forbidden palace. You cant really tell how big it is from the outside, but once youve walked through a couple of walls you get the idea. Its a very impressive and very imposing palace, the biggest in the world. The architecture is stunning. There seems to be a lot of hostoric buildings, gardens etc. Very many more than in Japan (although Kyoto has tonnes) After walking around there for a few hours, and seeing the intricate detail in everything that was the palace, i decided i wanted to get back to the hotel for some more bowling. Tonight we went to a chinese acrobatic microcosm. It was pretty spectacular. The way they can move and twist and blanace, still it wasnt quite as polished as the cirque du soleil.