Night time photos and Massage

I've attached some night time photos from the Hostel. The hostel really is very pretty in the day and has a great atmosphere at night. Overall both Beijing and Xian have been very grey in the architecture but still some very impressive places. We are looking forward to the next stage of the journey.Within the next week we should being seeing Giant Pandas, going to a stunning national park (if the BBC documentary we saw before coming is anything to be believed) and going on a Yangtze River cruise. All these things should take us out of the grey city scape's and into the green country side we saw on the train journey here. It is interesting that whilst the city is so grey the Chinese seem to love their parks and when we went for an evening stroll through a local busy park we found lots of people dancing. Dancing in time like a Zumba work out, ball room dancing and everything in between. I wonder if few people have large gardens so they make great use of the public parks with people of all ages doing exercise and stretching. 

Michelle had a very intresting experience yesterday with a 'traditional' Chinese massage!!!!!  -  First here you wear no clothes while being massaged (which was bit odd) they also straddle you ......I did start to think I had booked the wrong type of 'massage'!!! then the woman assaulted, there is no other term, me by attacking my muscles, this woman had more strength than the strongest men I know put together!!! Pain is not even the word!!! after this she then explained that I had "many toxins" in my back and that's why it hurt! for another small sum she offered to remove these toxins with another 'massage' I should have learnt my lesson by now but no my crippling polite English nature said sure why not!!! THICK!!!!! she told me to lay down and then SCRAPED!!! my back with some credit card type device which killed!!!! My mild English nature again reassured her that I was fine, even though every muscle in my body was tensed! After she finished 'cleansing' me my back felt on fire!!! when Gareth came in I asked him what it looked like and he took a picture to show me!!! See picture above!!!! To be honest even though it hurt the actual massage was really nice!  The big lesson here though is NEVER NEVER NEVER let someone 'remove your toxins'!!!

We have another long (16 hour) train journey tonight before we get to our next stop we are sharing