Day 2 in Beijing continued ...

I'm a bit more awake now. Yesterday was fun. Breakfast consisted of something with something, something and tofu. Sha and I then caught a bus to the zoo. I learnt that the bus timetables are not as complicated as they seem to be!! We bought tickets for both the aquarium and the zoo. The aquarium is extremely impressive. It's in a huge modern building and I saw lots of huge sturgeon swimming around. We also went to a sea lion and dolphin show along with about 10000 other people! Then we went to see the pandas (btw ... not in the aquarium ... in the zoo)!!! Pandas are lovely. They don't do much ... they just fall asleep or eat bamboo shoots.

The zoo is huge! We walked around for hours - even spotting some kangaroos and emus - before decided that we were much too hot and so went across the road to the planetarium (another enormous modern building) to see a show (which contained Galileo speaking fluent Chinese) and then looked around the museum. I'm amazed. The entire exhibition that we saw seemed to be on celestial dynamics. There were plenty of diagrams with circles and lines indicating inferior conjunction and "Eastern Quadrature". There were questions for the visitors to try and answer like "Can you explain the motions of the inferior planets?"

We then took a look taxi ride to the outskirts of Beijing to visit Sha's cousin and her new husband Ben. They're a nice couple! I think that I've agreed to go mountaineering with Ben sometime soon in Nepal. Suddenly all their work colleagues turned up (oh, this was the first time that I've been inside an apartment in China - it was very nice) and we headed out for dinner at a Yunan restaurant. After the meal we drove to the hutongs in the centre of Beijing for a typical Beijing dessert (very odd ... basically a strange yogurt with beans on it) in a small, traditional cafe that cook only just about fit us all in. Then we went to a bar, climbed a ladder into the attic and played card games until about midnight.