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After breakfast, we caught another cab to the Forbidden City, Beijing's largest tourist spot. The Forbidden City was built in the early 1400's during the Ming Dynasty and for the next 500 years was the imperial household for China's emperors. The Forbidden City has been home to 14 Ming emperors and 10 Qing emperors, until the fall of the imperial rule. The city was surrounded by tall walls to keep the emperor safe from the public. It is said that the entire complex consists of 800 buildings with 9,999.5 rooms (this half room was to keep the palace with less rooms that the heavenly Jade emperor).
After we'd had our fill of the dancing, we made our way back around to the park gate and across the street to the Forbidden City. The crowds were almost unmanageable here, as it continues to be Golden Week. Not a good time to visit Beijing, unless you enjoy being pushed around by the crowds. We tried to keep a positive attitude as we wandered through the first few gates and garden sections. This palace is so huge; we checked out the map, only to find we had hardly made dent in it! We stopped to get some noodles that the locals were all buying up like crazy. The only problem was you have to find hot water to add after you open the package. We saw some people with thermos' of hot water but weren't sure that was such a smart idea considering it probably came straight out of the tap. It was a toss up between just forgetting the noodle idea or trying to eat them with cold bottled water. We chose the cold water and after a little while soaking, the noodles broke apart enough to eat, but not enough to be super tasty. At least we can say we tried. This also called for much staring and snickering by the locals passing by.
Around 3:30pm, we had our fill of the palaces, and decided to go back to the hotel for a little resting time. After all, we would have a long day ahead of us at the Great Wall tomorrow. It took a lot of effort to figure out how we were going to get to the Great wall. This involved negotiation with our hotel staff for their "friend" to bring us there (600 Yuan), then they wrote long directions in Chinese to take several public buses and taxis, but we finally booked a tour through one of the hostels here for only 90 Yuan per person. We have to be there tomorrow at 6am and they will bring us to the Jinshaling section and pick us up at the Simatai section, and then back to Beijing. For dinner, we went to the nearby Hard Rock Cafe Beijing (part of the Cross family tradition of visiting HRCs). It was good to eat some more western food - we really just don't find much we enjoy eating in Chinese menus. Off to sleep for a very early wakeup tomorrow morning.
Day 127 - Beijing < | Index | Photo Galleries | > Day 129 - Great Wall of China © 2007 Blue Ocean Studios, LTD. All rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Services | About | Contact Prints | Return Policy | View Cart World Travel Galleries | World Travel Blog | Links |
We started off the day by searching the local area for a more "western" breakfast this morning. We weren't sure we wanted to have dumplings and biscuits again at our hotel. Unfortunately, all of the restaurants we saw along our side streets were Chinese and seemed to be deserted (it was almost 10am, after all). The only thing in sight was the KFC, and that didn't seem appropriate for brunch. We remembered seeing a Subway sandwich shop nearby and decided we could make do with an early lunch. We took a cab, but it turned out we could have walked because shortly down the road we spotted a Starbucks and decided to go there instead. 
As we approached the palaces, we saw that the thousands of local tourists were still out on holiday and many had the same idea as us today. The entrance gate was a steady stream of people going both in and out. We noticed a park to the north of the Forbidden City gate and quickly read up on it in the guidebook. Jingshan Park is a large garden and temple area with a central hill that overlooks the Forbidden City. Supposedly, we'd be able to get a good view down into the city from this hill that was constructed from the dirt dug out of the Forbidden City's moat. We went inside and checked out the beautiful peony gardens and tried to enjoy strolling through the packed park. We made our way to the top of the central hill, only to find out the lookout temple and its surrounding temples were all closed due to reconstruction work. We're finding many things are "works in progress" around here due to the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games. 
We came upon a spot near the top of the hill where they had several emperor and empress costumes and head pieces that people were busy trying on and taking pictures in. After some convincing, Mario got us all to try them on and we took our turns at the throne bench taking pictures. As can be expected, the locals were extremely amused with us trying on the costumes and of course had to take their pictures with us too! The rest of the park was busy with various activities including opera practicing, badminton (extremely popular here), line dancing, and ballroom dancing. It was fun to hang out and watch for a while. 
We finally made it into the very center of the Forbidden City, to the Palace of Heavenly Purity. With other names like the Palace of Earthly Tranquillity and Hall of Supreme Harmony, it was kind of ironic that there was nothing tranquil about this place today! In fact, all of the interiors of the buildings, except one displaying musical instruments, were closed because of the high volume of people visiting. We think it's kind of sad that the only time some of these people can come visit Beijing, all of the palaces are closed. This led to the hoards of people pushing and squeezing to see through the small glass windows at each palace. We opted not to try to push our way in through the crowds today. 