Day 2: The Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace, and more!

OK, Day 2!

We figured the best way to see as much as possible in our limited time was to go on a guided tour. While Alex and I both like the freedom of being on our own schedule (like we did in Ireland last year), we also liked the idea of being able to ask a guide to give us the inside information on the places we were visiting...especially since it wouldn't have been easy to find someone else who spoke English! So we signed up for two guided tours: one that would take us to the Forbidden City (a.k.a., the Imperial Palace), the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven, and another that would take us to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs.

Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into! Our guide for both tours was Allen (Chinese name Yun Yi...at least, I think that's what it was). He was a short, Chinese 20-something. He wore a black business coat (long) and carried a briefcase (which I never saw him open). He did NOT carry a flag or wear a colorful hat or do anything else that would distinguish him from the other 10 million short Chinese people wearing black. And he was on a mission: to get us herded through the cool sights in as little time as possible so that we would have more time to spend in the tourist traps (a.k.a., the Pearl and Silk factories). So he walked really fast. When we stopped to take pictures, finding him again was like trying to find Waldo...only Allen wasn't wearing a striped shirt. So it was like a Where's Waldo where Waldo looks just like everyone else.

Aside from the ever-elusive guide issues, both our tours were great. The weather was gorgeous both days, and even though we did have to go a lot faster than we would have liked, it really was the only way we could have gotten in everything that we did.

Our first stop on Tour Day 1 was the Imperial Palace, otherwise known as the Forbidden City. It is called this because until about 60 years ago, only members of the imperial family were allowed to see/be inside it. It was completely forbidden, upon pain of death, for any commoners to not only go inside but also to simply look inside! The grounds were massive. The complex was divided into three different sections: the front section was the business offices, the middle section was the residential part, and the back section was the gardens. There were 9,999 rooms! This is because 9 is an important number in Chinese lore, and because only gods were allowed to do anything with 10,000 of anything. Allen explained that if a person was born in the FC and visited a different room every day, he or she wouldn't repeat a room until they were 27 years old!!

Here's Alex in the first courtyard of the palace. It was SO big!


This is the beginning of the residential part of the palace. Over to the left of the picture, you can see two golden lions. These represented the Emperor and Empress. The Emperor lion held the world (a sphere) under his paw, and the Empress held a baby lion under her paw.


This was the "honeymoon suite" of the palace. After getting married, the Emperor and his new wife would spend two days in this room. It couldn't be an extended honeymoon because the Emperor got married every 2 to 3 weeks! Emperors typically had more than 2,000 wives!


Click here to see the Day 2 photo album with lots of other shots of the grounds and the gardens.

After the Forbidden City we went to the Temple of Heaven. This was the temple where the emperors went to pray for a good harvest. It was a gorgeous area--very wide open!


This is a shot of the steps leading up to the front of the temple. The dragon-carved stone in front of Alex was the part that the Emperor walked on. No one else was allowed to step on that part!


Click here to see the Day 2 photo album and more pictures of the Temple of Heaven.

After the Temple of Heaven we went to the Summer Palace. This was perhaps the area that we did the least justice. It's not actually a palace--it's a summer resort for the imperial family. It was massive--7 times the size of the entire Forbidden City. We easily could have spent the entire day there, but we went in, went straight to the lake, took a boat ride across the lake, and left. We did get some nice shots of the grounds, though, and learned some very interesting things!

This was the entrance to the Summer Palace. The entire grounds is heavily wooded to help the imperial family escape the heat of summer. As you can see, Alex and I were in China right at the beginning of spring, so we were able to catch some beautiful blooming trees. Check out that white!


This is the famous marble boat. No, it doesn't float. It's marble. The story goes, the Summer Palace was built in the time of the infamous Dragon Lady, the mother of a 4-year-old emperor. She would sit behind a curtain behind her son and basically tell him what to do to rule the country. She was cruel and just a *bit* eccentric. She was the driving force behind the construction of the resort grounds. She had the lake dug, and the earth removed from that was piled next to the lake to create a man-made hill on which the residential buildings sat. She also had a lot of money to spend on building the first Chinese navy, but she spent a great deal of that on building this marble boat instead. And she stayed young-looking by drinking breast milk. From the source. Yeah.


Here's a shot of the residential buildings of resort. We got to ride across the lake on really cool dragon boats. But that meant that we didn't walk around the buildings at all. So you'll just have to imagine their opulence. It had to have been a pretty sweet view, though!


Click here to see the Day 2 photo album, including more pictures of the grounds, the dragon boats, and a Chinese Bevo!

After the Summer Palace, we went to the Pearl and Silk factories. They were both very interesting--we learned and witnessed how pearls are harvested from fresh-water oysters (and we got a couple of small ones as souvenirs!), and we learned and witnessed how silk worms' cocoons are stacked and stretched into luxurious silk blankets. Both of the demonstrations lasted about 5 minutes. We then had about 45 minutes in each of the factories' show rooms/gift stores. It was the only time on our tour Allen wasn't in a hurry to get us to the next place! We *almost* bought a beautiful blue silk duvet, but we came to our senses in the nick of time and walked away.

So, our second day in China was full of perfect weather, interesting factoids, and great sights! We went down to the Wanfujing shopping area that night to walk around and discovered the Donghuamen Night Market. Those are pictures you won't want to miss! I'll post those, along with our trip to the Great Wall, next!

Thanks for visiting,
K.

Day 1: Tian'anmen Square and Temples

The first day was cold and misty...not the ideal weather for tourist-ing around a city, but c'est la vie. Luckily our hotel was only a short walk from Tian'anmen Square, so that's where we started. It was cool to be in such a historic place!

The funniest part of this day is that I started to understand how much I stood out from the crowd. When Alex would stop and take a picture of me in front of a landmark, 2 or 3 other people would also take a picture of me! I got lots and lots and lots of stares. Alex also was quite a phenomenon. One guy took a picture of him--he was trying to be sly, but Alex noticed--and then the guy was startled when Alex took a picture of him!

This is looking into Tian'anmen Square. The tall skinny thing is a monument to the people, and the big building in the background is Chairman Mao's memorial.

They really do love Chairman Mao!

Here's Alex in front of the gate in Tian'anmen. As you can see, Chairman Mao's portrait has been hung in a very honorable, prominent place!

There were groups of soldiers marching by every 20 minutes or so. I thought it would be funny to get a picture of me marching with them. When they realized what I was doing, they didn't think it was funny. At all.


We left Tian'anmen Square and took the subway (what an adventure! From the looks I got, it was not a place that tourists frequent!) to the Lama and Confucius Temples. They were both beautiful, serene places filled with people praying and paying their respects.

The Confucius Temple grounds. That's Confucius himself. Well, not really, but you know.

A giant bell and bell ringer at the Lama Temple. You can see the ornate architecture in the background.

If you'd like to see more pictures of Tian'anmen Square, the two temples, our hotel, our first attempt at ordering lunch and tea, and the infamous "pant slits" on the kids, check out the Day 1 photo album.

Next I'll post about Day 2, including the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, and the world's hardest-to-follow tour guide!

Thanks for visiting!

KC

Getting There

After about five hours of sleep, I left the house at about 4:15 a.m. last Thursday morning. I'm fairly used to getting up around 5 or so, so it wasn't really that bad. The plan: 2.5-hour flight to Chicago, 14-hour flight to Shanghai (up and over the N. pole), then a 2-hour flight to Beijing. Coupled with layovers, it would equal a total travel time of almost exactly 24 hours.

There were lots of very interesting people in the waiting area at the gate in Chicago. There was an old Chinese man wearing a single gray glove, kind of like a weird, Twilight-Zone, Chinese version of Michael Jackson. There was a gay couple--one white, one Chinese--who were watching episodes of The Family Guy on a laptop way too loud. The funny thing about these guys is that they both had headphones around their neck. I guess they were more like fashion accessories than actual functional headphones. And there was a couple from Dallas who were on their way to pick up their Chinese adopted baby. What a trip it would be for them!

I got to my seat on the long flight before my seat-mate arrived. I was hoping for good luck here -- a bad seat mate on a 14-hour flight can be deadly. A middle-aged man approached and gestured to the seat next to me. I noticed he had a surgical-style face mask on his back pack. I thought maybe he, too, had heard about the awful pollution in China and had brought it for his trip. I was wrong.

Turns out the guy was a germ-a-phobe. He brought the mask so that he wouldn't contract TB on the flight. He then launched in a diatribe about "nasty" blankets and pillows that we are given. Super. Kind of just made me want to snuggle into my American Airlines blanket and sneeze on him.

The flight was really ... really ... really long. Although there were movies and TV shows on the little seat-back screens (30 Rock just never gets old), 14 hours is still a hard flight. I finally got to see Juno, though. Liked it. We were also an hour late getting out of Chicago, and I knew I only had a two-hour window in Shanghai in which I had to go through customs and then make my connection. It was a little stressful, but I knew that at the end of it all I would see Alex's smiling face waiting amid a sea of strangers.

Except that I didn't. He wasn't there. After 24 hours of traveling and the stress of making my Shanghai connection, I was devastated to realize that my struggles weren't over quite yet. I walked around the receiving area for about 15 minutes, looking for him in vain. Alex is so much harder to spot in a crowd of Chinese people than he is here!

Finally I found him. He had just arrived after sitting through 2.5 hours of traffic on the way to the airport (a trip that should have taken him about 45 minutes). He, too, was understandably stressed out, since he thought he might have missed me.

So that was the story of getting out there! It was long and at times harder than I had hoped, but it all ended well! Tomorrow I will post pictures of our first day in Beijing: Tian'anmen Square, Lama Temple, and Confucius Temple.

We're home!

plane ticket from Austin to Beijing: $800
subway ticket to Tian'anmen Square: 2 Yuan
entrance ticket to the Forbidden City: 25 Yuan

Being the only blonde in a city of 12 million: priceless

I'm so sorry to all those who were looking for China-trip updates this last week. Apparently blogspot is on the list of Websites the Chinese government finds dangerous and therefore bans. But we are home safe and sound and four hours earlier than expected thanks to a favorable tail wind and catching the earlier flight on standby.

I will post lots of pictures and stories soon! Stay tuned!

K.

Why I Love My Husband (Reason # 1,832,419)

As of today, Alex has been gone for one whole week. I've been surviving the loneliness mainly by virtue of the fact that I have been busy 10, 050 of those 10,080 minutes. And those extra 30 minutes in there I was a zombie.

As my coach so aptly quipped (as he was hollering us up a hill at run practice), I have three jobs right now: my day job, my freelance work, and my training. I don't know why, but last week I told my freelance manager that, "sure, I can take on a few extra assignments." I mean, Alex would be gone and I'd have all this free time on my hands. Why I can't just hold onto that free time is beyond me. Anywho, so I've been working. A lot. And Alex has been gone. Right. We've established that.

Here's where I get to the point. Reason #1,832, 419 why I love my husband: he takes care of everything. Everything. While I'm out working, working, or working out, he's keeping our bills paid, our house picked up, our cats fed, their litter box clean, the trash taken out, the floors vacuumed, the mail picked up, the weeds pulled, and the dishes done. Yeah, and he works, too. And occasionally works out. I'm glad to be able to say that I knew and appreciated all the things that he did before he left. But I don't think I truly appreciated it until I was left to do all those things myself on top of what I was doing before.

I am trying gamely to do it all in his stead, but at this point, it's the desperate, nose-above-water treading.

I know I've told him that I appreciate him. But I want to say it publicly. My husband rocks the casbah.

#44--success??

The day before my 29th birthday was a typical blustery March day ("In like a lion" and all that). It also happened to be the day of the Austin Kite Festival. I've always wanted to go to the AKF. Ignoring the fact that Alex and I aren't really "festival" kind of people, especially festivals in Zilker Park (the parking alone is a nightmare! Yowza!), this was what I wanted to do to celebrate my birthday. But, to complicate (or enhance) matters, I wanted to fly a homemade kite and thus check one more item off my list.

Problems:
1. I've never made a homemade kite. (solution: find kid-friendly directions on Internet)
2. I didn't have time to get the materials ready before hand. (solution: send Alex out the morning of while I'm at practice)
3. There aren't enough hours in the day to go to practice, come home, get clean, take a nap (a must if I'm to have energy for anything else that day), make a kite, test said kite, go down to the kite festival, find parking (see above gripe), and actually get the thing in the air before the end of the festival at 5:30. (solution: .....nothing comes to mind.....)

I must say that the plan started off well enough. Alex got the supplies. Well, they didn't have paper big enough, so he brought home a greensheet, which launched a debate into whether we should use newspaper or a trash bag, a debate the kid-friendly instructions were absolutely no help in solving.


I got up from my nap ready to be creative! The cats were even in on the action:

As you can see, they were super helpful.

Our process shots:

Check out the killer tail...
With our newly made kite ready for testing, we headed out to the park in front of our house. By the time we got there (100 feet), the tail of the kite had wound so viciously around the kite string it took us a good 10 minutes to get things sorted out.

Then, it was time to fly! To my utter surprise, Alex claimed he had never flown a kite before. How is it that kites have never come up in 12 years together?? I tried to patiently explain the kite flying etiquette that so many of us internalized at 7 years old: one person is the "flyer," the other is the "thrower." The Thrower holds the kite in the air, ready to throw it up into the wind. The Flyer stands with his or her back to the wind, ready to nurse the kite higher and higher by either running or working the string up, down, back, and forth.

I'm fairly sure all Alex heard was the "running" part.






As you can see, the kite didn't really ever make it too far off the ground. It was a trooper, though. It only sustained minor damage from being dragged along the rocky turf at high speeds.

My attempts at the "string coaxing" technique were not much more successful.




So does this count as a successful completion of #44? I think the spirit of the task was to be creative and have fun. We had a lot of fun building the kite, which was quite creative if you ask me. It wasn't as much fun flying the kite, but that's 'cause I'm too much of a perfectionist and if it doesn't work right it might as well not work at all.

We kept the kite--Alex swears using a plastic garbage back will make a difference. We might return to this task again in the future, but for now, I'd say that all in all, it was a fun afternoon and definitely worth crossing off the list.

PS - for those of you wondering, we never did make it down to the kite festival. Oh well--there's always next year!

China, here I (we) come!

We bought my ticket! I am officially China bound. I'll be leaving Austin on Thursday the 27th early in the morning and be getting into Beijing Friday night (gotta love the 14 hours I'll lose because of the time difference--on the other hand, on the way back, we'll leave at 4 p.m. on Wednesday and get into Chicago at 4:45 Wednesday...what my brother aptly quipped would probably be the "longest 45 minutes of my life").

The "super excited" hasn't quite hit yet b/c we haven't gotten my visa worked out yet, but I can still feel the excitement creeping slowly in. We'll be staying in a hotel in the middle of the shopping district, 2 km from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Sweet! The best part is that Alex's company will be paying for said hotel. Double sweet! And his food, which we will probably just share. Triple super sweet! The hotel website also said there's a park nearby where you can rent bikes--that seems like the way to go to see the city!

So yeah, it's gonna be awesome. Yay!