Before even coming to Shanghai we knew that we would eventually be taking a trip to Beijing and then the Great Wall. It is simply what you do when you are in China. Or what you should do. Or something. When I say that we made the journey a couple of weeks ago it is understood – only what is natural. When you look at the calendar and realize it took us nearly a year in China before we actually made the trip – well that takes a little explaining. All I can really say is that since we knew we would make the trip sometime, it became easy to put it off until the end.

There is a night train from Shanghai to Beijing and we decided to take this path. We ordered a soft sleeper (which comes with soft beds as opposed to the hard beds we could have ordered). They come four beds to a room, and with only three of us (we came with our friend Sara) we prayed that our other bed would be occupied by either no one, or at least someone old and quiet. What we found was not one person occupying the extra space but two. We looked at our tickets to make sure we had the right room, showed them to the two elderly Chinese people occupying our space and got curious looks on our faces. The couple looked at the tickets, acknowledged that they were valid and for this room, then the old man moved off one of the beds and moved to his companion's bed. We moved our stuff in and wondered if they would both sleep in the same bed.

Expecting to get very little sleep, and to have a miserable night, I settled in for a very long journey. In preparation for the trip, I had put a couple of movies on my iPod and I queued up the new TV version of the Andromeda Strain. The night went amazingly smoothly. Sure it was a little hot, and the bathroom was gross due to a mix-up involving where to put used tissue paper (often the Chinese toilets are not meant for tissue and instead you must put them in a waste basket) but mostly things were fine. The old man eventually left for his room, the lady was quiet, and my movie was just the right thing to make me sleepy. By 11:00 I was sound asleep. At about 6:00 the next morning the lights automatically came on and our train arrived in Beijing by 7:00.

Refreshed and relaxed, we headed for our hostel and dropped off our stuff. The first tourist destination was Tiananmen Square. Touted as the world's largest public square but more well known for events in 1989 (that I can't talk about here) we were curious to see what exactly there was to see.