It’s safe to say the attempt to sleep was unsuccessful for both of us

We’re woken to some more food being offered: Dave has omlet with sausages & a hash brown whereas Daisy has some pork noddles

Before 1pm, we land into China and muddle through immigration to sort ourselves a free 24-hour visa as we are just here for 12 hours before the next leg of our journey

Thankfully, the airline is organising our checked bags so we just have our hand luggage with us for venturing outside the airport – but first, coffee

It’s incredibly toasty here at around 30°C; we hop on the Capital Airport Express to take us to Downtown Beijing (see the featured image)

The public transport system here doesn’t seem to favour tourists as you have to provide one of three forms of identification to purchase tickets, but thankfully their ticket counters are usually manned

We grab a train that takes us to Wangfujing Pedestrian Street where looking online states it might have some food for us

It’s a jazzy entrance to walking around this new country for us for sure but no food just yet; we walk around and find St. Joseph’s Church amongst the glass buildings of the area

We have a pit stop, at a place Google Maps is calling Kuaile Homeland, for two variations of noodles: one with chicken, the other with beef

Following this, we wander towards the centre of Beijing in hope of visiting the Forbidden City

There appears to be a national holiday happening today with extra security in place as well as road and pedestrian blocks around; we get to wander around the outer walls and moat of the Forbidden City

Ideally, we were aiming to go within the walls and visit Tiananmen Square but it’ll have to be another time; instead, we get a good, close up view of the outside of the National Centre for the Performing Arts

It’s getting dark and it’s time to grab some food again – we head to a place we went past earlier for a favourite dish of ours

…However, it seems Daisy brought us to a different place which was a little pricey-er than we were feeling so we pop to another nearby restaurant, called Lucky Spring Pancake (which isn’t listed on Google Maps)

Half Peking Duck to share with some tea – only difference from this we have in the UK seems to be that the pancakes were oily rather than floured and the various sauce options for the dish – yummy ????

Feeling pretty shattered as the lack of sleep is catching up on us, we decide to make our way back to the airport

Once through security and customs, we find that most of the airport is shut sadly but Goose Island pub is one of the last open places

Here, we have a sort of nightcap of an IPA and a house white wine with some of the cash we had left while we wait for our flight after midnight