Ho ho ho, merry christmas!  Ok, it’s a little premature but I’m feeling rather festive here in ‘jingers thanks to the recent snowfall that’s coated the normally grey city with a couple of inches of white icing.  Our friend Matt (Skeath, from Vodafone) has come out to sample the wonders of China (he didn’t believe you’re allowed to shit in the streets and had to witness it for himself) so I’ve taken a few days out to see Beijing’s sights in the freezing snow.

We headed out to the Temple of Heaven – this huge park in the south of the city is home to Beijing’s snappily titled iconic circular building “The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests”.  The park itself is bustling, it’s full of locals practicing Tai Chi, kicking these strange feather things (no, not chickens) and singing karaoke – not bad for a snowy Tuesday morning.  A couple of hours of walking, a good blast of fresh air and a couple of snowballs thrown by Matt managed to clear away my hangover from the previous night nicely.  Schoolboy Skeath even excelled himself and built a snowman outside a temple, although it was a little concerning that the snowman was yellow.

Next on the agenda was Tiananman Square and the Forbidden City.  Whilst strolling the square an odd thing happened.  A couple of girls came over and muttered something about a photo – ahh, they’re tourists who want us to snap them together in front of Mao’s Mausoleum, so I reached for the camera.  How silly of me, Mao’s not the tourist attraction of choice for these giggling girlies,  we are.  So Matt and I took one for Blighty and posed arm in arm with a pretty Chinese girl each.  Over the last couple of days this has become quite a regular occurrence, the tourist-as-tourist-attraction highlights so far include an entire tour group of Chinese posing next to me in the Forbidden City. Matt then trumped this by getting swamped by a group in the Summer Palace and later a man almost tried to marry off his daughter to him, calling him a ‘handsome young man’ over and over again in Chinese.

In between becoming local celebrities we’ve also taken in a couple of temples, the drum and bell towers of Beijing, the Olympic park at night, eaten mouth-numbing Sichuan food and supped beers at Stelios’s favourite bar, Hooters (the one where waitressed have tight hot pants and big steamed dumplings).  Today we trekked out of the city to visit the Great Wall which, thanks to the snow, has been transformed into an Olympic-sized luge.  Needless to say I ended up on my ass a couple of times providing great amusement to the locals – I bet you didn’t see Michael Palin do that.

It’s a cracking day today, it’s chilly 4 degrees but the sky is clear blue.  We’re off to the train station to book tickets to Xi’an to see the terracotta army and we might even squeeze in a trip to Tianjin on China’s bullet train.