Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City

Trip Start Jun 30, 2009
1
27
34
Trip End Ongoing


Loading Map
Map your own trip!
Map Options
Show trip route
Hide lines
shadow

Flag of China  ,
Sunday, October 4, 2009

Survived the final sleeper train journey to arrive into Beijing at 6am. Spent the last hour of the journey talking to a sweet Chinese teenage girl who wanted to practice her English on me. (I decided not to practice my Mandarin on her as it consists of precisely four words, so the conversation was going to be pretty one-sided!). It was really interesting talking to her; I was surprised at how much access to western culture the Chinese clearly have. She had read all the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings novels, her favourite bands are Coldplay and Westlife (!) and her favourite movie is Twilight. Before I came to China I thought all western culture would be pretty much banned but it's not; you can find Kings of Leon CDs in the shops, Starbucks everywhere, you can get the BBC online and on the TV, but then at the same time things like Facebook and hotmail are banned. I can't work out how this whole capitalist communist state thing works and our guide Tomic doesn't seem to be able to explain it either.
Tiananmen Gate
Tiananmen Gate
After checking in to our hotel, we took the bus to Tiananmen Square. I have never seen so many people in one place in my life! Tiananmen Square can hold a million people and I should think there were close to half a million people there when we arrived. In order to actually get onto the Square we had to queue for about half an hour to go down a subway. Being a Westerner in China can have its plus points, especially in a crowd of a few tens of thousand Chinese, makes you easier to spot and less likely to lose your friends! Once we actually got onto the Square we had a quick look around the colourful floats from the National Day parade; it was really difficult to get a sense of how large the Square is because there were just so many people about. Interestingly there was no mention of any of the events that took place in 1989! No mention of tanks!! We then treked over to the other side of the Square to the Tiananmen Gate and the entrance to the Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City is HUGE! Trying to do a whistle stop tour around it in a couple of hours especially when you've come off the sleeper train at 6am and are pretty sleep deprived is probably not the best plan. We had a local guide who showed us through the Forbidden City, which is stunning and truly beautiful, but I was really not in the mood to take in anything she was saying. Trying to stay awake in the baking sunshine was about all I was capable of!

After a couple of hours rest back at the hotel, we headed out for a meal and then on to see a Kung Fu show. I wasn't majorly keen to go and see this, but as the rest of the group were going I thought I'd tag along too. I'm glad I did! Apparently the Shaolin Monks 'Legend of Kung Fu' show had just been on tour in London's West End for a month and it made me chuckle to think that we were seeing it for a fraction of the price of the inflated West End. It was actually more of a musical then a show, but it was spectacular and I was more impressed with it than the Acrobats that we saw the next night.



Slideshow Print this entry