Beijing: Day 2 of Touring, and Catching Up

Hello everyone!  How are you all today?  I'm just wrapping up my second day of touring in Beijing, but the combination of internet challenges and the fact that we got in quite late last night mean that I have some catching up to do.

I'll go right back to the 4th, our fist day in Beijing.  We got into town and checked in by mid-afternoon.  After we'd got settled in we took a cab to meet up with some friends of Euphy's mom, and they treated us to dinner.  We had a terrific meal at a place that is famous for its Beijing Duck (or as we'd call it back home, Peking Duck.)  The kitchen was glassed in, so you could see right through to the giant oven they use to roast the duck.  It was a great first meal to have in Beijing.

After we finished up dinner we headed to Wang Fu Jin, a large shopping street that has lots of food stalls flanking it.  There were tons of different edible assortments up for grabs, including these goodies:

Mmmmm... who wouldn't jump at the chance to eat a centipede...

Yeah, the centipede thing was grossing me out a bit, but I was all over the scorpions.  I've actually been saying for awhile now that I wanted to try a scorpion when we got to Beijing, so I was pretty excited when I saw those little guys skewered up for my dinning pleasure.  It was at the point that Euphy told me in no uncertain terms that eating those bugs would be a very bad idea.  Actually, she strongly discouraged me from eating anything up for grabs there as the cleanliness of the food was questionable.  I was pretty bummed about that, but I didn't feel like risking intestinal distress on my very first day in town.  I still want to find some tasty scorpions to eat though...

After being taunted with delicious insects we headed to Tian An Men Square since it was easy walking distance from where we were.  We actually knew that we'd be going there the next morning with the tour group, but it was fun to just do something on our own, and the place looked awesome at night.  We've actually dropped ourselves in town in the middle of a week-long holiday in celebration of National Day here, so the area was decorated and lit up beautifully, and very lively!

After a bit of wandering around there we just grabbed a cab back to our hotel and called it a night.  We were up early the next day for our first day of touring.  We're part of a group of around 50 people, travelling in a large coach bus with a tour guide.  Our guide Xu Zhi Yong is a really nice guy whom is apparently quite amusing to the people here who speak Cantonese... I just take the pictures.

We headed to Tian An Men, and in the daylight I was able to get a proper sense of the scale.  That really is a truly massive open space, and the size of it was just accented by the fact that I was there with one or two billion other people.  Yeah, national week off, crowds.

Unlike the previous day where we were just taking pictures of that famous photo of Mao, this day we walked through those gates that he's guarding and had a wander around the Forbidden City.  Oh what a wander!  As with the Square outside, this place seemed to have half the population of our fair world wandering around in it, but it really didn't seem to have a a lot of problems containing the crowd.  It was hard to tell from inside since the City is very segmented, but I'd have to estimate the size of the place as being about the size of downtown Toronto... and that used to be one guy's house.  Not a bad way to live.  Unless you've got bad knees.

I went a little bit bananas with the photos within the Forbidden City.  I've got over 100 photos just from that portion of the day.  I'm on vacation, so there's the need to capture everything I see for posterity, but I still can't help myself when I've got my camera, and I'll try to get some artistic shots here and there too.  So for anyone who I subject to the full gallery of my photos after this vacation, I apologize in advance for the Forbidden City section.  Building with orange roof, another building with orange roof, brick wall I felt a deep spiritual connection with, Euphy in front of a building with an orange roof... you get the idea.  Here's a sampling of what I got:

I also came across one of the greatest sign images ever:

I feel relaxed just looking at that.

After we left the Forbidden City we headed to the Temple of Heaven.  This is where the Emperor used to go to worship.  There's a lovely park surrounding the facility, and a collection of interesting buildings forming a courtyard around it, but the main temple itself is the modest little thing here:

Once again, pretty crowded.  The courtyard surrounding the main temple is largely just wide open swaths of paving stones, all walled in, so the crowd was generally funnelled along fixed paths.  This left most of the courtyard free of people, and I actually stopped at one point and snapped a photo of an empty stretch of courtyard just so that I could say that I got a picture without any strangers in it.

After the Temple we headed off to a small auditorium for an acrobatics display, which was quite entertaining.  I've got no photos of that since they specifically requested that you not take photos during the show.  I'm glad I didn't make an attempt either, since I noticed during the show that they had ushers wandering around with green laser pointers shinning them into the lenses of people trying to illegally capture a photo.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, a green laser is substantially more powerful than your run-of-the-mill red ones.  Powerful enough in fact that in a dark room you can clearly see the beam, which is how I noticed what was going on in the first place.  I can imagine that anyone trying to take a photo with a green laser directed at their lens would probably just end up with a nasty green photo.  I can also imagine that anyone who was hit in the face with that laser while the usher was trying to get it trained on their lens would probably have the charming side effect of permanent vision damage.  So yeah, if you're in China and they tell you not to take photos, you should probably just tuck the camera away for awhile.

Today we started our tour off with a visit to silk factory.  They took us through the process of harvesting silk from silk worms, and they gave a lengthy sales pitch for the quality of their silk bedding.  In Cantonese of course.  I just practised my smiling and nodding.  It's the inevitable practice of holding a tour group hostage in a store for an obscene amount of time in the hopes that they'll eventually just get bored and buy something.  Annoying to be sure, but I was actually pretty impressed with the honesty of our tour guide who freely admitted that his company was being paid to bring us to this shop and asked for our patience since that's part of what helps keep the cost down.  Not how I wanted to spend my morning, but I appreciate the honesty either way.

We spent the afternoon in a city outside of Beijing called Tian Jin.  It's a huge metropolis with a little core in the centre of town that contains a cluster of very, very old buildings.  They've kept the traditional setup of shops on the ground floor and apartments up top, so it's a very cool old shopping district.

Oh yeah, and TWO of the shops looked like this:

I'll let you hazard a guess as to how difficult it was for Euphy to get me out of the empty handed.  I was considering just giving up clothes for the rest of the trip so I could fit this blue one into my luggage:

So that's a wrap for today.  Actually, in catching up with renaming my photos and getting this post put together I've really stayed up far too late.  I'm just hoping now that I'm caught up that I can keep some regular blogging going without it having a major impact on my evenings.

Before I call it a night though, this one's for Jay.  I couldn't find any supercars, but how about this sexy ride?

Have a good night everyone.