Following a late night, we had a bit of a lie-in on Sunday and we weren't sure whether much would be open as it was New Year's day. We met up with Mark and Coman and another friend of theirs, Feargal, and took the metro over to Haidian to see the Summer Palace. The metro is great - it costs 2 yuan for each single journey which is about 18p, and it's very easy to navigate. None of us had eaten so we bought egg pancakes from a street vendor for about 45p, very delicious. The Summer Palace was fairly crowded, but we managed to find our dragons: a display by seven or eight acrobats dressed as Chinese dragons (Simon thinks they were lions) - fab. We climbed up through the palace - some of it has steps but the gardens are quite extensive and rocky so we all did some rock-climbing too! At the edge of the grounds is a beach and what looks like a large lake but it was completely frozen over and people were walking across it to get to an island in the middle. All the water outdoors here is frozen over - the river by Tianan'men and the moat around the Forbidden City, really amazing. The Palace also has its own lake surrounded by small shops, and we hired tiny toboggans which you steered with large ice picks and raced each other around the lake which was hilarious, and I think nearly all of us fell off at one point or another. It's very hard to steer with oversized ice picks and almost impossible to stop! We found a great place for dinner that night (good old Lonely Planet) where we had loads of food and chatted for hours - a really pleasant end to a great day.

On Monday, we were all up and out early for our car at eight o'clock which took us to a section of the Great Wall which most tourists don't visit. We were joined by Dave, another of Mark and Coman's friends who is studying in Beijing, and the six of us squeezed into a car for an hour's drive out of the city. We'd all put on extra layers - Simon and I had on two pairs of trousers and most of us wore about three or four t-shirts and jumpers under our coats; it was freezing with a bitter wind but the sun was shining and the skies were clear blue.

There was no-one else around when we got there, and we had to climb uphill through scrubland before we reached an opening in the wall. There was an awful lot of uphill, some of it very steep where we had almost to crawl, and there were patches of snow and ice dotted around too. We stopped several times to take pictures, to catch our breath and to rest our legs. The views were incredible, and you could see other parts of the wall snaking away in the distance over the hills. We walked just over a mile along the wall, climbing up and over some of it - you can only imagine what it must have been like for the people who had to build it all those centuries ago. It took us about an hour and a half to walk as far as we could before the wall became almost vertical, and then about an hour to walk back (most of it was downhill but at points it was so steep that we had to go really slowly). We chose a different way down from the wall on the way back and climbed down a rocky cliff which was great fun. We stopped for lunch at the only cafe which showed signs of being open where we enjoyed a meal which included 'dumpings' (gotta love those English translations), then an hour's journey back to town where we all slept as we were exhausted from the fresh air and exertion. What an amazing trip though - we were so glad that we'd managed to organise a trip to a part of the wall which was off the beaten track; apparently some of the more popular parts of the wall are much flatter ('for the fat American tourists' according to the guidebook...) and even have a Starbucks hidden inside the towers - not really what we were after!

We've now booked flights to Tokyo; we were looking at taking a boat which takes two days from Tianjin to Kobe rather than fly, but it was quite expensive and also doesn't run during the New Year holidays and so we would have had to wait until the 1st of March... Tokyo was the cheapest flight that we could find, and we've booked a couple of nights' accommodation, and we'll decide where to go from there once we get there and suss out what's what.

Before we leave Beijing, we're going to head over to the Olympic park, visit some of the parks and temples and visit the Forbidden City too - all in the space of three days. All this sightseeing is tiring!

We've found a way to access Twitter while we're here (pimpmyip.org) but still no luck with Facebook, and we've not been able to access wikipedia either - the internet censorship over here feels very odd, but at least we have some access and are able to blog. One of the other things which is odd is the crazy things you can find on menus; so far we've seen greasy intestines, pig's ears, chicken feet, goose heads, scorpions (no, really), grated donkey, and today we were in a restaurant where they had little turtles in a tank too. Each to their own, but yuk yuk yuk. We're sticking to chicken, beef, pork and vegetables, thank you very much.

Hope you are all well, and please keep the comments coming - we love to know that you're still following us and it's lovely to hear from you all!

Simon and Jane