After our ‘one night in Bangkok‘, we headed to the airport for our 10am flight to Beijing, China.

Bangkok airport is a major hub and we found ourselves on a 20min jaunt to our gate, via an electric train to one of the outlying terminals, where we were greeted with a golden symbolic snake!

A mere 5hrs later we were landing in Beijing, this time to be greeted by a phoenix as we waited for our bags.

It’s fair to say that leaving the airport, we felt a little unsure, but despite not having a working phone (issues with the SIM and the use of a VPN), we managed to find our way into the city, on the Airport Express train. We then changed tubes twice, to eventually arrive in the Wangfujing district.

Sadly we got the wrong end of Wangfujing Street, meaning we had to ring our hotel and get them to direct a cab driver to our final destination.

Whilst the journey from the airport to the hotel took almost 2hrs, it proved a real experience and a great opportunity to get to know the city and meet some locals on the train & tube.

We are staying at Base Apartments which is very central, just a couple of miles from The Forbidden City, which we are visiting tomorrow on a 4hr tour.

With a need for food, we navigated our way to a quaint high street, close to our hotel where we tried a restaurant famed for its dumplings.

What an experience the night proved, Michelle was able to make sense of the menu so ordered two lots of dumplings, one pork and the other vegetarian. Both were served with a tasty vinegar which proved a great success.

As we settled into the meal, we got chatting to a local young couple who were keen to practice their English.

We also made a new animal friend, a small kitten in a basket on the next door table where the owner was popping in for a quick snack!

The dinner was a great success and we grabbed a couple of photos with the Chinese couple who we had been chatting to about our lives in England and their love of David Beckham!

This is one of the great things about travelling, meeting people in random situations and finding out about their lives and realising they aren’t much different and that they too are kind and genuine.

As you will have gathered, despite thinking I wouldn’t be able to post until 30th August due to Chinese restrictions on certain apps, we have thankfully been able to find a VPN which overrides this and allows us access to Gmail, Google and WhatsApp.

Hopefully we will continue to have access and the blog updates will be daily as they’ve been up until now.