Made it out of the hotel today! :) Yesterday was a scheduled rest and adjust day, and I pretty much slept for 24 hours hours, so I was keen to get out of here and see some of the city. Today's itinerary included:
1. Tiannamen Square in the pouring pouring rain
2. The Forbidden City in the still pouring but starting to lessen rain
3. Hutong district in the puddles caused by the earlier rain
4. Up a mountain to see the City in the clear air
:)
But first, breakfast- although it was only hotel food, i had very tasty fried noodles with veggies, jaotse (Chinese dumplings), and other sorts of veggies that you might associate with lunch at a good Chinese restaurant back home. None of those sound very breakfast like to a Westerner, but in Asia they don't distinguish so much between meals. Many people would eat fried rice from the previous day's leftovers and that sort of thing for breakfast- whatever is available. I didn't care because I was starving- I brought some flapjacks with me as I suspected I wouldn't bother eating dinner the day I arrived because I'd be too tired to bother, but I was definitely ready for breakfast.
Tiannamen Square is very interesting- it's not really like it seems on TV. When you're walking around on it it's just like an enormous flat park area. There are flowers on the sides, and 2 enormous flat screen TVs showing scenes from all over China. There's a monument to Mao and his family. Mainly people go there because it's the main entrance into the Forbidden City. I didn't think I'd be seeing the Forbidden City in such terrible weather, but in the end we managed! My tour guide's English name is Jeff, he was quite a trooper and showed me the off the beaten path parts of the palace which were great for photographing. It's hard to believe that 250,000 people per day come to the Forbidden City- at $10 each that's a ton of money. If the weather had been nice I think it would have been so packed that I don't know how we would have seen anything at all. If there was ever a special open day with limited access it'd be worth taking it. The rain was so bad that I didn't get as many photos as I might have done- I took quite a few, but I was totally freezing by the end of it. Photos to follow! Fortunately the air was clear for us to walk up this hill and look down on the Forbidden City- I had no idea how enormous it is!
After a tasty lunch (if you haven't guessed tasty food will figure highly in basically every post from now on) we went to Hutong. It's a protected area of Beijing, because the houses there are the same style as most people used to live in before Mao had them demolished to make way for high rises. This old way of living, while lacking modern conveniences like personal bathrooms, has the advantage of being very communal. Each person has a room or 2 in a very big courtyard, but they share cooking space and they have to use the public toilets around the corner. The people seem to have a quiet way of life, and lots of tourists come to take rickshaws through the area. I took a rickshaw for a bit, but wanted to walk around and see what it was like there. I got to have tea in a very kind woman's house- she had a little bird she'd trained to say "ni hao" to visitors. "Ni hao" means hello. :)
After Hutong I was very wet and cold, and came back to the hotel for a nice hot shower and a nap. My jetlag hasn't been too bad- I've slept when I was tired and if I wake up I just do something for a little while and then go back to sleep. It's 3am here right now, and I'm finishing this post that I started earlier in the day. After this back to sleep for me! :)
We're off to the Great Wall tomorrow and the Temple of Heaven, so it'll be a full day. The wall is about a 1.5hr drive from the city, but at least it's a chance to rest a bit in between things to see and do. This car is a bit on the older side- it doesn't have a defroster so the windows just fog up and the driver rolls a window down to defog them. Not bad in the summer, but in the winter it feels a bit chilly. :) People are used to the cold here, houses don't have a lot of heat.
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