Emily and Mitchell in the USA

We arrived in Chengdu early in the afternoon and our hotel was just minutes from the highspeed railway station. We checked in, and then immediately went back to the station for a little day trip. We were on the train to Chongqing to explore the weird and wonderful city.   Up on the 27th floor! From the station in Chongqing, we caught the metro and headed to the city centre to find some of the sights which best encapsulate the oddity of the city.  Our first stop was Hongyadong Cave. It was a higgldy piggldy building full of shops built on the side of a cliff which meant that we entered from the road (on ground level) but when we looked over the balcony towards the river, we were actually on the 9th floor!  We then walked along the road overlooking the river for a little while until we got to the Kuixing building. This was another illusion building. Once again we went just one flight of stairs up from ground level to reach a lovely plaza with Chinese style buildings su...

We arrived into Beijing airport from Hong Kong in the evening. They fed us very well on the plane, and we still had food to eat for dinner. We went out to explore the area, but our phones hadn't set up properly yet, so we couldn't buy anything at the street market. Luckily, Mitchell's phone works in China (and only China) so for once we have two phones to help us get around.  It seems WhatsApp/Facebook etc only work on data, but they do work. The hotel wifi in Beijing was very restrictive, so we couldn't access lots of sites and couldn't download anything like podcasts or movies.  They also gave us a room upgrade for free! I'd booked the cheapest room at the hotel, just a small one with no window as we'd be out during all daylight hours anyway, but they gave us a huge one with a sofa and the bed in a whole different room!  This was our hotel This was at the end of our street Breakfast was ordered online which made things easy for us, and we got some soupy po...