Hello Kate

In Beijing and Kate is here!! So lovely to see her. She is just exactly the same and it's just as though we have seen her yesterday. Although she has picked up a few bad Chinese and Aussie speech habits,such as "uh" for "yes" which we are already working hard to break her of. Her Chinese is very impressive though!

We had a good flight from Hong Kong, but didn't arrive until about midnight, and of course we were up til about 1.30 greeting our last wee darling, so a bit tired today. Lily is great, and has been very pleasant and helpful. We have Mr Liu again as driver too - he remembered Charlotte particularly.

It has been a gorgeous clear sunny day, pretty nippy but not much wind and pleasant in the sun. We started the day with some exercise in the garden of the Temple of Heaven with all the locals who go there everyday to do theirs. Lily persuaded us to join in some of it - it's more energetic than it looks.

The Temple of Heaven itself was looking stunning against the sky in the morning sun. All the important monuments have had fresh paint and a general spruce-up in honour of the olympics, so everything looks sparkling fresh.

We went for an early lunch of Beijing noodles, at the place where you went Jiggs, where they shout out as you go in. It was a pretty good lunch - we wished you were here to help finish it!

Mr Liu dropped us off at Tienanmen Square and we walked across the square to the Imperial Palace and Forbidden City. That's looking great too. The moat is frozen solid, and there were hardly any other tourists so we were able to look at everything very easily, and get good clear photos (no download facilities here unfortunately).

We had a quick hour at the silk market, enough for Bill to replace his suitcase, and me to replace my handbag just before the straps of the old one fail completely, Hannah to buy a jacket, and Charlotte and Kate to buy (independently) identical shoes!

Then off to the acrobatic show, which was completely amazing. Some of it was almost too scary to watch (when two guys were juggling and skipping up on top of spinning cages), or a bit horrifying (when three girls almost turned themselves inside out one on top of each other), but it was spectacular. The girls on bikes were great, and the best part was all the young guys tumbling through hoops at top speed.

Our Beijing duck dinner afterwards was in a private banquet room, and as well as duck we had a selection of delicious other things, once again more than we could manage.

Now we are at a little internet cafe just down the road. Great wall tomorrow, and the hutong. We are loving it, especially having Kate with us. Love to all xxx