Day 04 - Monday 16th May

We’d booked a tour today to visit three of the main sites in Beijing: the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace. The tour was due to go all day from about 8am to 6pm partly because it also included visits to showrooms where they would try to sell us things. We’ve seen this before in Asian cities.

The tour guide and bus arrived on time at the hotel at 7:50am and proceeded to pick up a couple from a different hotel. There were only five of us plus the guide and driver on the tour in a big bus. The young couple were from Brazil and the lady was a Romanian who currently lives in the US.

We found it hard to understand our tour guide, Michael. Although he was Chinese and his English was quite good, he spoke like Fronk the wedding organiser from Steve Martin’s film Father of the Bride. You had to listen hard to work out what he was saying. By the end of the day, I’d decided it was too hard and relied on Suzy’s quick summary of the parts that she had caught.

At the Forbidden City, we saw where the emperors lived since about 1400AD until 1925. There were lots of temples and lots of tourists who were mainly Chinese. You can see why it is the centre of Beijing and the top site-seeing destination.

The next stop was the silk factory. We saw a demonstration of the production of silk that reminded us of our childhood hobby of keeping silkworms. Initially the hard sell convinced us to buy a silk quilt but as we waiting for the others to buy what they wanted, we decided it was all too hard to carry it home in our luggage with our restricted weight limits.

Next we went to the Temple of Heaven. Although, there are not as many buildings there, the surrounding park area is huge and peaceful. For lunch, they took us to a restaurant for a Chinese banquet in the grounds of the Temple of Heaven.

It was a 30 minutes drive on the bus to the Summer Palace. This is built around a very large artificial lake. We caught a dragon boat to the other side of the lake to the empress’s palace and climbed many stairs to the top to get a great view of the buildings, lake and surrounds with the modern city buildings in the distance.

The last stop was a pearl showroom. Suzy doesn’t wear pearls and so we waited patiently while the others spent money.

We got back to the hotel in time for happy hour and more red wine. After the big lunch, we only needed a simple dinner and so we decided to stay in the hotel restaurant.

The same head waitress, Lisa, was on duty again and she asked us about what we had done today. She also made the mistake of asking whether we were happy with the hotel and we spent a long time telling her how very impressed we have been with the quality of the hotel, the service and the staff. Trip Advisor has great reviews for this hotel and they weren’t wrong.

Once again, we had coffee up on level 15. When we got there, everyone else was using iPads. I felt guilty because I only had an iPhone. The WiFi reception is better on level 15.

We had an early night in preparation for our departure tomorrow morning for London and a long flight.