We enjoyed the rest of our time in Beijing and visited the Summer Palace which was stunning and very easy to enjoy a day there, we preferred the Summer Palace to the Forbidden City, it is like a country park with its own lake and beautiful gardens. The construction of the Summer Palace started in 1750 royal garden for royal families to rest and entertain. It later became the main residence of royal members at the end of the Qing Dynasty.
We decided to do a Great Wall of China tour and we knew there were 2 types, ones that included the shopping part which were a lot cheaper and ones without the shopping. We thought that the shopping one couldn’t be that bad so we went for the cheaper option. We had a great morning walking the wall and then a really good lunch and went to a jade factory where they told us how to spot real jade from fake and then let us wander round the shop.
From there we went to a silk factory and were shown how they get the silk from the worms and how they stretch it to make duvets and the like which was quite interesting until they started the hard sell. There were only 7 of us in our group and none of us wanted to buy anything so a few of us thought we would make a break for it and wait in the car park but were told that we could not leave the shop until we had been there for 30 minutes so the tour company could get their receipt to say we had been. We were not impressed at that. We then had to endure a tea factory which actually wasn’t that bad and were shown the tea ceremony and got to try some tea but the hard sell from the previous place had put us off from it all and so we were pleased when it was over. Next time we will always take the no shopping tour.
We managed to find a restaurant that did almost Western type Chinese and so we managed to have a few dinners without any nasty surprises.
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