Beijing for Tourists, Part Two

The Forbidden City, Tienanmen Square, and the Summer Palace are three of Beijing's main tourist destinations. We didn't do them all in one day, but the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace did seem quite similar in many ways.  The Forbidden City, though, had more secret police, enormous images of Mao, and tourist gaggles. The Summer Palace was even larger than the Forbidden City, though the latter usually gets recognition for being such a gigantic sight.  Indeed, there were gobs of tourists sitting and laying in any space with even a sliver of shade or a place to put one's rump.  We thanked our hours upon hours of temple-hopping over the previous five weeks for getting us into shape for the marathon that was the Forbidden City,  It was hot, crowded, and never-ending.  The sight itself is made up of hundreds of buildings, all clustered in different areas.  We visited gardens, bed chambers, temples, guest rooms, kitchens, and every other type of room you'd expect to find in one of the grandest palaces in Asia.  We felt good every time we passed a mass of resting bodies without needing a break.  We stuck to ice cream in the Beijing heat, enjoying our first (but not last) ice cream-lunch of the trip.  We saw jewels, recreated living quarters, jade sculptures, photos of later members of royal dynasties, and heard all about the history of the Forbidden City from our lovely audio guide.  There is definitely a difference between an audio guide voice who speaks English as a first language, and one that speaks it as a second.  For instance, it took us a while to figure out that every time the guide said "air-ee" she was really saying "area."

After a full day at the Forbidden City, we crossed the street to walk through Tienanmen Square. It is as big as they say and is supposedly teeming with secret police.  The not-so secret police, or plain clothed police, outside the Forbidden City were easy to spot, so we tried to pick them out of the crowd in the square.  Besides the size, the next two things that stand out about the famous square are the gigantic propaganda screen (playing a pro-China video on repeat that implied that China was the freest, most affluent, happiest, best-looking country in the world - all set to very inspirational music) and the dozens of cameras set to observe the square from every visible post and building.  The cameras were a blatant reminder that China is always watching, as were the two police vans parked behind the propaganda screen.  The whole thing felt very eerie, especially if you turned to face the massive painting of Mao quietly observing from its perch
across the street above the front gate of the Forbidden City. Actually, if you ever missed seeing Mao's face in China all you had to do was pull out any piece of paper money, since his mug is on every denomination.

The next day (after a fine meal at a less-traveled dumpling restaurant with PL and a family friend) we ventured to the Summer Palace. We didn't spend more than a few hours there because it was pretty similar to the Forbidden City, but the sheer size, grandeur, and elegant layout made us fans of it as a tourist stop.  We rode a boat across the (man-made?) lake, traipsed up and down hills and through old, often crumbling structures.  We often felt as though we weren't in a city at all, kind of like spending a day in Discovery Park, only the wildlife and beaches are replaced with scores of tourists, once-gaudy temples and old palace buildings, and many kilometers of paved and stone paths meandering around the lake, over the lake, and through all of the eroding splendor.









Highlights of these two days:

 Standing in Tianamen Square, thinking of the great and terrible history of the bricks under our feet.

Getting lost in the meandering maze that is the Forbidden City.

 Jeff running around the area surrounding the Forbidden City for an hour looking for a cash machine. We were shocked he had to go so far to find one, but it was, less surprisingly, located near a cluster of Peking Duck restaurants for tourists. (More on our Peking Duck experience in a few posts...)

Ice Cream Lunch!!