We flew to Beijing from Dalian. From Beijing we would fly back to the U.S. and none of our Chinese companions would be joining us for this final leg of our China trip. In fact, none of our Chinese companions had very nice things to say about Beijing. Roc warned us about the "Peking cough" due to bad air quality and the Dalian crew gave the impression that there was not much to see in Beijing. But, if we insisted on visiting Beijing we might as well check out the Purple Palace also known as the Forbidden City.
Beijing is one of those nice big cities that has public transportation via subway from the airport to the main lines of the subway in the city. The cost for this ticket was 25 Yuan, cash only. (This information will be critical in a later post.) We made our way with just one transfer to the subway stop closest to our hotel. As we exited the stairs from the subway into the city of Beijing I was struck by the blueness of the sky. Contrary to the warnings Beijing boasted the cleanest and clearest air I had seen since Shenzhen. Finding the hotel proved a little bit of a puzzle but we made it. The lobby was full of multicultural school children singing Christmas songs. We regarded them as annoying being that we felt rude having to duck in front of doting parents filming the performance to make our way to the front desk. But good for them for spreading the Christmas spirit I suppose. I told Joseph that if the children were still there when we returned to the lobby later I would be complaining. In retrospect I may have been a little tired.
Our room was nice but we had a view of the other side of the hotel and the ceilings were just a little too low for my taste. But I had been a bit spoiled. We were back to a big city. The room was going to be smaller. We only had two days in Beijing and this was one of them. Tomorrow was devoted to the Great Wall so we decided to make our way to the Forbidden City on our first afternoon. A bonus of our hotel was its central location so we were able to get to the forbidden city on foot. As we walked through Beijing I was reminded of Washington D.C. The city scape of Beijing was fairly low, like D.C., the vibe was international and historic, and it was just pretty.
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| Homemade Broom outside the forbidden palace
My experience of visiting palaces was that there would be one mansion and maybe an in law house somewhere on the property. So as we stepped into the walls surrounding the Forbidden City I was expecting to find a singular palace. Instead I found huge stone paved courtyards boasting a central palace which then repeated for what felt like miles. I particularly enjoyed the stone carvings around the palaces and the detailed tiles atop the palaces.
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| Welcome to my palace |
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| Badass dragon |
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| A little village within the palace compound |
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| Joseph takes a break from the never ending palaces |
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| Ferocious! |
After viewing multiple palaces we decided to walk back to the hotel stopping at Tiananmen Square on the way back. Joseph wanted to buy a treat off a guy selling wares stuck into a haystack on the back of a homemade motorbike but I shut his idea down pretty quickly.
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| The treats that got away. |
The architecture of the buildings on our walk was captivating as were the random happenings; such as two guys tag teaming this log with a saw.
Some of the streets in Beijing are quite expansive and highway-like so they are gated off from pedestrian traffic and to cross the street you need to find the appropriate tunnel to bring you from one side to another. Tiananmen Square, the famous site of the demonstration and murder of college students in the 1980's, has a south square and a north square. We waited in a line, put our bags through and x-ray and submitted our passports to be admitted into the square. The x-ray, line, and passport submission were par for the course in China, security was pretty high every where you went be it an airports or a palace. It felt particularly ironic to go through all this security to simply walk outdoors in a square famous for the government murdering innocent student demonstrators. In any event, we found ourselves on the less famous half of the square and getting to the other side via tunnel and possibly more security felt exhausting so we settled with a view of the famous side from the less famous side.
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| Tiananmen square |
Seeing as we were a bit gassed we decided to dine in the hotel restaurant where we had earlier seen a fine looking buffet was being set up. The buffet was mostly good but not as fresh as the one in Dalian. My favorite part of the buffet were the meringues I had found at the dessert station though I was informed after eating several that they were actually meant to be decorations. I started to explain that meringues were one of the four food groups but then just gave them up without a fight. I try not to be a trouble maker when I travel abroad. I try. Besides, there was already another American lady at the restaurant being loud and annoying on the other side of the dining room. She would have been annoying in Texas as much as she was in Beijing and I also don't like for people to fulfill the stereotype of the loud obnoxious American. I guess when I travel abroad I feel a personal responsibility to represent our country. And the image I try to portray is polite, non aggressive, and gracious, or the opposite of our currently highest elected official.
After dinner we checked out the spa scene and sampled the various hot tubs. Back in the hotel room we plotted our trip to the Great Wall of China.
Tomorrow: The Great Wall
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