Spent a good hour wandering around a hutong (old building area) looking for some sort of tasty morsel for brekky. Ended up munching on this fried bread thing that was really more grease than bread.. Not super enjoyable…

On our way back to the subway (we were headed for the Summer Palace) we ran into some lost looking Canadians who couldn’t find their hostel. Their hostel was inside the hutong we had just spent an hour being lost in ourselves so we spent the next hour helping them to find their hostel. I swear we walked up every back alley possible looking for their damned hostel. Finally after much looking (and endless hours on Cameron’s 3G mobile) we finally found their hostel. It turned out to be a really old but beautiful building that was only costing them about 6 dollars a night to stay in.. Really sweet deal! Not sure i’d recommend (purely because it is impossible to find and not that close to the subway) but definately cheap.

Had a proper brekky with the Canadians at their hostel and discovered that Aussies have a lot of “Aussie-ism” words which I didn’t realise we did!! For example; when we sat down to have our breakfast and opened the menu I asked every one “what they felt like for brekky”… they burst out laughing.. they had never heard the term brekky for breakfast. Another example as we were perusing the menu i said “flippin heck” referring to the cost of a cup of coffee… Tara (one of the Canadians) had no idea what I was talking about!!! Honestly, we have heaps of Aussie-isms that I assumed all english speaking people use but clearly not!!! Very humourous…. for the rest of the day every time I said an “Aussie-ism” they would burst out laughing and try to use it in a sentence!!

After brekky (which turned out to be lunch as it was after 11am) we all trooped off to the Summer Palace for the afternoon (all being; Cameron, Tara, Kelly, Richard and myself). The summer palace (SM) is just breathtaking, it leaves the FC for dead. The palace is set on the side of a large hill and looks out over this huge man made lake.. It is absolutely stunning. The palace is also really really big and we didn’t even get to see half of it. Would love to go back and spend some real quality time looking around the palace. Might try for later in the week (if I have much free time).

Said goodbye to my new found friends as tonight is the night that I thought I started my trip… Found out when I returned to my hotel that I had misread my information and the start date was Monday.. oh well.. had fun while the fun was to be had!

Dinner tonight was Broccoli and Fried Rice.. Yep I ordered what I thought was a broccoli and beef dish to find it was just plain broccoli stir fried.. It was really quite good but amusing at the same time.

Off to the museum tomorrow to get some more culture into me!