Our last few days in Beijing were action packed adventure for sure! Thanks in part to Michelle Obama's visit to China, our flight from Xi'an to Beijing was delayed. (She was flying from Beijing to Xi'an and we were flying from Xi'an to Beijing on the same morning.) When we arrived in Beijing, we were supposed to go directly to Tiannamen Square and the Forbidden City but David decided that we should move that excursion to a different day because the Forbidden City was going to be closed that day. The plan was to go to the Summer Palace and the Beijing Zoo instead, which we should have done on our last day in Beijing, and then we would do Tiannamen and the Forbidden city the day we left. It was a great plan in theory until our flight was delayed and the Summer Palace and zoo had to be postponed, too. This pushed everything to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and boy have we run our hinies off!
So on Tuesday on the way to the Great Wall, we visited a jade carving factory, followed by a stroll down the Sacred Way, the roadway to the Ming tombs.
After our trip to the Great Wall on Tuesday, we went to a traditional Peking duck dinner (yummy!) and then a Legend of Kung Fu show, which was pretty amazing.
On Wednesday morning it was the Temple of Heaven, which was an amazing sight to see. The whole thing was built without the use of a single nail. They used all dovetail construction to put this baby together. The temple is completely round while the surrounding park is square because the ancient Chinese believed that heaven was round and earth was square.
Then it was on to the pearl market and we all got our shop on. It was a total shopping blitz - five floors of fake purses, electronics, jewelry, clothes and souvenirs and only two hours to bargain for it all! Our group had a lot of fun hunting down the best deals we could find on stuff that none of us needed.
After the pearl market, it was on to the Beijing Zoo to see the pandas. They are so cute! The pictures just don't do them justice, especially since they are behind a glass wall and it's hard to get a good picture of them because of the reflection and the fact that you are one of about 200 people all elbowing in at the same time to get the same shot. China. You've gotta love it!
We also saw what our guide refers to as "the naughty monkey." This handsome fellow loves to terrorize his visitors by walking over towards you, climbing a branch and then suddenly hurling himself full throttle at the glass wall that separates him from you. Even though we knew it was coming, most of our group screamed when he did it. There's nothing like 100 pounds of crazed monkey hurling straight at your head to get your blood pumping!
When we had recovered from our monkey trauma, we headed for the Summer Palace. Like most of the landmarks we've visited in China, it was a very pretty place. It's situated on a lake so we got to take a dragon boat ride to one end of the palace grounds. Then we walked back through the longest corridor in the world. There are 14,000 paintings adorning this covered walkway and no two are alike. It was amazing!
The Beijing hustle continued today with our trip to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. We were all wondering what David was going to tell us about what happened in Tiananmen Square or if we were going to hear the People's Republic's version of events or even a complete denial that anything ever happened. Turns out that he was one of the student demonstrators who had been demonstrating in the square for days and he escaped death or imprisonment by virtue of the fact it was his birthday the day before the military took action against the demonstrators and he and his friends had been partying and drinking all night and were sleeping it off at a friend's house when the tanks rolled in. He said that he doesn't know how many people were killed but that the whole square had to be repaved because they couldn't clean up all the blood. And FYI, Tiananmen Square is absolutely huge, so it's pretty bone chilling to think that the whole thing had to be repaved to eliminate the blood stains.
So if Tiananmen Square is huge, then the Forbidden City is super mega gigantic! The Forbidden City served as the main palace complex for China's emperors once the capital of China moved from Xi'an to Beijing. David said that the walk from Tiananmen Square through the Forbidden City is two miles. We all think he lied. It has to be longer than that. It took us three hours to make the trek and we rarely slowed down, let alone stopped. I didn't get very many good pictures of either Tiananmen or the Forbidden City. For one thing, it was super duper smoggy today, so everything was covered by a thick haze of pollution. The other thing is that there are 1.3 billion people living in China and I think that at least half of them were trekking through Tiananmen and the Forbidden City today, so if you stopped for even a few seconds to take a picture, your entire group would just disappear into the swarm so you had no choice but to raise your camera over the throng, point it in the general direction you were hoping to capture, press the shutter button and hope for the best. The sheer volume of people was absolutely staggering. It wasn't too bad in the huge open courtyards, but in areas smaller than that, it was like Disneyland after a parade on Labor Day weekend. Times ten.
It's been an exhausting but fun few days in Beijing, but it will be good to get home. We're all gonna need a vacation from our vacation!
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