It’s been a running hilarity that we can never seem to get a car that close to anywhere we stay. In Beijing our driver went round the block countless times, eventually giving up. We were staying at the Fly by Knight Courtyard, located in a traditional hutong alleyway.

It was located in a rabbit warren of an area, we always had to double check which our entrance was. It was fun being diverted on the way home by older Chinese engaged in games like Mahjong on the street.

It was a wonderful place to stay with a delicious breakfast offered in the communal space with other friendly guests. A major highlight was joining their weekly Kung Fu class in the courtyard right outside our room, our legs ached the next day!

One problem across the city was that many roads were closed because of rehearsals for the 70th national anniversary taking place in two weeks’ time. Metros were disrupted as well and to walk around Tian’anmen Square was impossible. Getting around proved quite hard and we did have to do too much walking.

Our visit to the Forbidden City was not fun for any of us (despite being beautiful – Tom and I enjoyed runs around it’s moat). We did find the clock exhibition interesting, and learnt a little about sundials, drainage systems and that the number of beasts on a roof of a building is an indication of the importance of said building (9 is the maximum).

A much better experience was visiting the Great Wall itself. It really was breath-taking. Aided by a bright blue cloudless sky, the site of the stone wall undulating over the hills was a stunning sight.

We decided to book a tour that would take us to the Mutianyu section, which we had read was more child friendly and not too far from Beijing but still with good views. A 3-km stretch of wall, you reach it via a cable car or a chairlift and toboggan ride down – but the second option doesn’t get you up to the highest of the 26 watchtowers so we went up and down by cable car.

We did amazingly fast walking round it all, enjoying climbing the turrets and very steep stairs at one point – but were still told off by our tour guide for getting back to the bus twenty minutes late. Most of the other people on the tour hadn’t done the whole stretch as they didn’t think they would have had time.

Annoyingly we realised then that we had booked the wrong tour, as all we wanted to do was see the wall and our day tour included a visit to the Ming tombs, a jade factory and a teahouse which wasn’t really necessary.

Thanks to Flounder Lee, an artist and professor I know from Dubai, we made a good stab at getting to grips with the Beijing contemporary art scene. We started off at 798 Art District, a Bauhaus-era industrial complex taken over by some of the leading galleries worldwide, interspersed with some quirky installations.

We started with an exhibition about AI at the Hyundai space and then went to Galleria Continua to see their exhibition of work by the late Leila Alaoui including a moving black and white video I hadn’t seen before and her iconic portraits printed on a massive scale.

We spent time immersed in Doug Aiken’s exhibition at the Faurschou Foundation, familiar with his practice from Victoria Miro.

We then went on to Caochangdi Art Village which is where Ai Wei Wei had his studio and other galleries have opened up. We enjoyed visiting White Space, Pekin Fine Arts and ShangART.

The funniest gallery experience we had was finding Arrow Gallery close to the Lama temple: it was literally a tiny shopfront with a screen inside showing an artist’s animation. We’d walked straight past it.

We ate pretty well in Beijing, finding some good local restaurants close to where we were staying and mastering our chopstick skills even further!

For our first night we went on a hunt for Peking duck and it was delicious. Other notable meals we had were of food from the Yunnan province, where subtle flavours reign, at Lost Heaven (we had missed visiting the original in Shanghai) and Little Yunnan.

Our two weeks in China were pretty busy but gave us great insight into this enormous, fascinating country.