(No Longer) Forbidden City

After a nice long sleep Tanny and I are now about half on this time zone. 6 hours ahead of Toronto time and 6 hours behind Beijing.

We managed to get up really early in anticipation of our first full day in Beijing, but it turned out to be too early to get breakfast at the restaurant in our hotel which didn't start until 7:00. Breakfast was acutally quite good. It's a buffet mix of Western and Chinese food with things like Chinese saugage (aka weiners), omellette bar, noodles, fried rice, watermellon, pineapple, etc. We ate for at least an hour before heading our to the subway.

We made it to Tienammen square without any problems. I was initially disappointed in that it seemed pretty small. Only later I found out that it was twice as large as what I saw when we first entered the square. It's divided by Mao's mauseleum (which is unfortunately closed on Mondays). The Square was very busy and full of many tourists, Chinese and foreigners alike. At one end of the Square is the Gate of Heavenly Peace - the entrance to the Forbidden City. It's on this gate that the huge portrait of Chairman Mao hangs. The Forbidden City was the living quarters of the Chinese Emperors in the Ming and Qing Dynasties for about 500 years. Inside there are many gates and halls with inspiring names like the Hall of Supreme Harmony and Palace of Heavenly Purity. We rented an audio guide which was pretty cool because it seemed to have a GPS or other proximity sensor and knew when you were close to each site and began playing the appropriate recording.

Unfortunately, many of the buildings were covered in scaffolding. I'm assuming they're preparing the site for the Olympic tourists in 2008. We saw enough buildings to get a feel for their majesty and spent nearly six hours there.

Inside the Imperial Gardens in the Forbidden city was numerous Cypress trees which look like giant bansai trees. There were also some trees that had green/gray/red mottled bark. There are some here at the hotel and I have no idea what kind of tree they are. Very unusual.

After the Forbidden City we tried to find the tourist information kiosk. We thought it was straight forward but walked down a progressively darker and sketchier road first, then retraced our steps and walked down the correct road and thought we turned on to the correct street but never did find the information kiosk.

We did find a very good restaurant and ate a super lunch of peanut chicken, fried rice and veggies. Poor Tanny was again faced with a waitress who seemed as baffled with Tanny's incomprehension as Tanny was baffled by her Mandarin. We ended up getting the English menu.

Once we ate we went out in search of the subway and found a major commericial center. The street was blocked to cars and turned into a pedestrian mall with huge stores on both sides. Not the communist ideal I expected! We also stumbled onto a side street that was a food market. Tanny was disappointed we had already eaten, but I was rather glad we ate where we did. The stalls at the start of the market had skewers of fruit and fresh noodles. A little further in however were skeweres of seahorses, star fish and scorpians!!! And the scorpians were still alive... squirming on their skewers! We got some pictures but didn't taste them.

We had planned to go to the Summer Palace but were both pretty tired and went back to the hotel for a nap. I watched the end of the original "Mr. Deeds" and all of "Taking Lives" before falling asleep around 7:30 pm. Tanny was out at 5:00.