The Forbidden City

Trip Start Jul 28, 2006
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Trip End Ongoing


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Where I stayed
Royal Presidential Hotel
(Beijing hotels)

Flag of China  ,
Sunday, August 20, 2006

We catch a flight to Beijing, which will be our final destination in China. We meet up with our guide, Wendy, and check into the Royal Presidential Hotel. They have given us a room with one bed so we are required to move to a new room where the internet is not working. After three hours of working on it, we are given free internet use for our stay but the day is over so Matt and I join our group for yet-yes, you guessed it-Chinese food. The Argentineans are protesting and go to the Sizzler down the street. I don't blame them. After dinner Debbie and I go by private car arranged by Wendy to the Beijing Opera at one of the more traditional, older theatres. The English subtitles appear very sporadically but I love the costumes and makeup. Part melodrama, part acrobatics, the opera tradition here is rich and it is a great evening
Wendy has warned us that Beijing will be some of the most strenuous walking we will have to do so it is off to bed in preparation for our trip to the Forbidden City tomorrow artwork summer palace
artwork summer palace
 .
Today we are off to Tie'am Square, the largest public square which can hold over 1 million people. Chairman Mao is also entombed here but we are spared standing in line to view his body. Next we head under the street via a pedestrian walkway to the Forbidden Palace. Built over 600 years ago, it is the largest museum in the world and has 9,999 rooms-9 being an imperial number reserved for the emperor. It is said that only God has 10,000 rooms in Heaven. The building is a series of complexes, most of which are undergoing renovation. We see mostly exteriors and only a few interiors. The last emperor to inhabit the palace was in 1924 and the building was opened to the public after the revolution the next year. It is called the Forbidden City because common people were only allowed there during the day on official business. In fact, only the emperor and his thousands of concubines, the empress, and male eunuchs were allowed to stay overnight. We visit the Hall of Peace and Hall of Everlasting Peace and some other buildings I don't recall the names of. We go onto the garden of the Summer Palace, which has a manmade lake; we take a dragon boat across. I am sure we would have visited the Summer Palace, which was 4 times larger than the Forbidden City, but it was burned during the Revolution and government did not try to reconstruct it. The gardens and lake are very nice but also undergoing reconstruction so we see little of the artwork.
After this we go to a Chinese teahouse to learn about the various types of teas. We have all agreed to revolt and refuse to go to another Chinese restaurant so I inform our guide we will be dining on our own that evening and we head for the local Piazza Hut-pizza was never so good! Tomorrow is our final day together as a group. I cannot tell you how wonderful this group has been. We all bonded instantly and pretty much agreed on what we wanted and didn't want to do. The men have groused, good naturedly, about our shopping and it has been a blessing for Matthew to have someone in his generation to hang out with. If I thought group tours were always like this I would never travel alone again. I think, however, we were amazingly lucky on our first ever-escorted tour and I will treasure my friendships with these people forever.
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