The Kennedy's Tour Asia - Beijing

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So I'm going to split up the Kennedy Tour by country. If you want every single little detail, talk to my mom! She's always thrilled to pull out pictures and relive it all!

While Mom, Dad, and Doug were here, I took very few holidays from work and went to meet up with the fam whenever I could, and it worked out really well. They first arrived in Beijing, so I took a long weekend off and flew down. We saw the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Empress's Palace and various other things. We booked guided tours for most of this, which was really nice, although expensive (for Chinese standards, anyways). I think it was worth it to not have to deal with finding transportation, etc. not knowing any Chinese.

The Great Wall section that we went to was pretty touristy, so really crowded, but it wasn't a big deal. Once we climbed up a fair bit, the crowds dispersed a lot. The wall seemed to go on forever. You finally got to a tower that looked like "the top", only to reveal another, higher tower in the distance. Mom, Doug and I went fairly far while Dad "took a breather". We probably walked for only about 2 hours or so, which is quite short compared to others I've talked to traveling the Wall.

The crowds were big at the Wall, but it was nothing compared to the Forbidden City. It was huge, very impressive, and really hot that day. It's amazing to think that such a huge, elaborate area was restricted to so few, but that's how the political structure worked at the time.

The Temple of Heaven was built for the Emperor's tombs or something? Mom could tell you, I can't remember, haha. But the grounds had lots of unique temples and gardens, as well as a big platform for built to pray for rain.

The Empress's Palace was basically a huge garden with some elaborate, traditional living quarters. An interesting aspect was the covered walkway, which spanned something like a kilometer in total, if I remember right. This was impressive due to the elaborate carvings, paintings and architecture of the whole thing.

Naturally, we also went to the markets to barter for knock off goods. I came out with a few shirts, a jacket, a belt, and a bunch of Xbox games that I think destroyed my Xbox, haha. It was all dirt cheap for "Polo", "Dolce & Gabanna", etc., if you're into the brand name thing. 😊

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Photos

Photo 8
This is one of the government owned shops that the tours are required to take us through to buy trinkets.