Beijing – Day 2

Today's first order of the day was to collect my train ticket to Mongolia for next Tuesday. This time I explored using the bus service and that was also good and cheap (1 yuan –20cents) for each trip. Ticket picked up ok. 

Next thing was to walk towards where I was yesterday to explore the Forbidden City (Lhasa in Tibet is also known as the Forbidden City). What I hadn’t realised yesterday when looking up at Mousey, is that it is not his tomb, but the entrance to the Forbidden city. I decided to be tough and walk there from where I collected  my ticket, but it was a hot day. The weather here reminds me of Brisbane summer, fairly hot in the mid to low 30’s but high humidity. Although I am told it got to 42c here in Beijing last week.

The walk took me past what is called Wangfujing Commercial Street, it is reportedly the historic commercial downtown of Beijing, now it is mostly a high priced shopping complex. However it did have an interesting market  area where all sorts of food and other stuff were sold. One food stall particularly caught my eye (see pic) as I could see small snake on a stick, Big Spider on a Stick, Scorpion and other various bugs and the like, usually on a stick and deep crispy fried.  I had only recently had breakfast otherwise I would have been buying up big, but this time I let it pass.

 

Another 20 min of slugging through the heat and I arrived at Tianamen Square again and the Big smily face of Mousey. This time no passport checks (yes 25th Anniversary of Tsquare was yesterday.) Although the Govt here  (in addition to all the normal stuff they block, has put the brakes on Google and Google maps, which sort of makes it hard to get any information, but then that’s what they are trying to achieve  - the dipshits.

The Forbidden City is like Russian Dolls, except with buildings. You go through one gate or big building and then you see another one, looking very similar to the one you have just been through. The Russian Doll analogy doesn’t quite hold, because they don’t get smaller and smaller. In fact they have the Tardis effect in that they either seem the same size or bigger. I heard it mentioned by one of the wanna be tour guides that there are over 71 different buildings in the forbidden city. It is deceptively huge. You will see from the pics the building sort of look the same, in the pics you are usually not looking at the same building twice, each pic is a successive inner layer. They  all called temple of heavenly something or other. It took me nearly 3 hours to wander through, and I didn’t explore the side wings. Then more buses and back to base camp for a beer.

Tomorrow, early start as have Wall tour booked and an acrobatic Show tomorrow evening. Might be  a Friday update.