China Day 20, The Forbidden City

Saturday July 16^th

Again I slept pretty well on the train and it arrived in Beijing only twenty minutes late, at 6:20am. We took taxis from the station to the hotel. That was fun, as Rally gave us written Chinese instructions for the cab driver and we lined up in a line with hundreds of other people waiting for cabs. Luckily there were lots of cabs. We arrived at 7:30 and were given two rooms, one for the men and the other for the women. We then proceeded to take showers one by one. We met again in the lobby at 8:30 to walk through the area to the local bus, which we took to Tiananmen Square. This is where the students were massacred for demonstrating against the government in 1989. Even now the Chinese don't talk about it as they can get in trouble. As a result many young people have never heard of it. The square is huge but there isn't much to see there, except a large red sign commemorating the 90^th anniversary of the Communist Party. However, there were thousands of people there. I had fun 'photo bombing' people. What's that? When some one is taking a photo of someone else I walk up and stand in the photo. It's fun to be at the back of a big group, or stand beside a little lady, or put your arm around someone. It always brings first surprise, then smiles and laughter and no one has ever told me to get lost. In fact frequently they want to pose with me some more. It's a great way to meet people and interact in a little way. I've done this many times in Asia. I also met a large group of Indians from Mumbai that I talked to after photo bombing them.

We crossed the road to get to the entrance to the Forbidden City. Again there were thousands of people. Rally took us on an 90 minute tour of parts of the city. It is huge, and contains many buildings, however, most of them are done in the same style and it all began to look the same. Plus you couldn't see in any of the buildings. That coupled with the sunny hot day, wore some of us down. At the north exit everyone left to go their separate ways to shop or eat or whatever. Paul and I decided to stay in the city and explore some more as we felt we hadn't seen it all (FOMO). We were right. We found two areas that you had to pay a little extra to get in, but they were museum buildings with artifacts from the palace, huge pieces of carved jade, furniture, and a room devoted to about 100 different and amazingly complex and large clocks that had moving parts of people or animals or waterfalls that were animated. Most of them were built by English and French artisans and were traded to the Chinese. Not surprisingly, the Chinese learned to copy them and improve them, and there were examples of them too.

When we left the Forbidden City, we crossed another street to Jingshan Park and climbed a steep set of stairs to a temple on a hill that had a commanding view of the Forbidden City. From here we could see just how massive it is. The last emperor of China committed suicide in this park when the city was overrun during the peasant rebellion.

We walked from there back to the hotel and took a break from all the walking and the heat. Later we went out to a local cafe for some dumplings before we met up with the group again in the lobby to go to the Kung Fu show. Getting there was crazy. The hotel was supposed to order cabs, but forgot, so poor Rally was frantic as she herded us out to the main street and tried to get cabs for us. For some reason most of the cabs wouldn't take us, but finally we got most of the people underway. Rally, Penny and I were last and it took awhile to get a cab. When we finally did we knew we were going to be late for the show, so she was trying to phone the theatre to let the others in before we got there. What a mess. Anyway, we arrived a few minutes late and then watched an excellent Kung Fu show. It is basically the story of one old master who trains a young boy to be his successor. It was done with lots of martial arts, dancing and Kung Fu stunts. The athletic ability of the whole group was amazing.

Getting cabs for the return trip was just as crazy. Some people headed downtown by tuk tuk, but Rally, Beverly, Penny and I went back to the hotel just as it started to pour! I fear the rest of them are going to get soaked.