A 4 hour stopover in Tokyo Airport which turned into 10 hours due to “leaves on the runway” or some other lame excuse from Chinese Air Traffic control.     The only beneficiary (some might say conspiracy !) of this delay was that several trips were made to the Duty Free Shop conveniently right next to the Lounge and the credit card took a bit of a hammering !    I did succumb to the temptation of an amazing set of wireless noise cancelling headphones by Bose that of course meant that all flight announcements were totally obliterated.    Made in to the Beijing Hotel by around 0200 and another blissful night in a static bed looking forward to a day in the Forbidden City in the morning.

WRONG !!!!!!!!!!

The moral of this tale is if you ever try to do a day of sightseeing in Bejing, avoid Mondays as everything is closed.   All Museums and the Forbidden City is – well just that !

I guess that I should have known something was up when the first sign that I saw when I emerged from the hotel was:….

Judging my the huge number of confused tourists in Tienanmen Square this is a fact that is not well known and was a tad frustrating to say the least !   So exterior shots only but you should get the idea……..

And it doesn’t get more closed than that !!

So a stroll around Tienanmen Sq

A Cab back the the Hotel some abortive blogging as I discovered that China are still blocking Google and thence Gmail etc.    Grrrrrr !!

So up at crack of dawn fore the ride to the Airport and a long but great flight home courtesy of BA first class (God dont you love those air-miles !!).     And I dont care what Brian May says, I think their new layout is amazing and who wants to look at all those clouds anyway ??   Well I guess he does…………………