Advertisement
Published: September 14th 2009
Edit Blog Post
Bus Trip
On the bus to the Summer Palace Hello everybody!
Went for a trip to the Summer Palace today, it's actually ridiculously close to where we are staying, only about half an hour by bus, so that was good. The place is amazing, like everything else I've written about so far. It was designed by the Empress (who was one nasty piece of work, read about her, she's a cow), so that she could get out of Beijing for the Summer. It was burned down a millions times by the French and the British, but they kept on rebuilding it. It's all built around a gigantic lake where you can take a bit of a sail around if you're keen, it would have been good actually but we didn't bother. On the lake is a marble boat - it's gigantic, and obviously doesn't float - stone has a strange habit of not floating overly well, but from what I can work out it was built by the Empress because she took the money for the Summer Palace from the Naval Budget, and I think it was sort of designed to upset them even more. Like I said, not a nice woman.
If you're going to the palace
yourself one day, you can take a boat from the Beijing Zoo - but Tom and Emmalita caught it and said it wasn't very good. And the tickets you get with it don't get you into everything either, so maybe it's not such a good idea.
If you get the through tickets, you can access everything in the park. There's only two of those places that we went into - we ran out of time for the others because we had to wait for an hour and a half to get our dodgy "fast food". The first one is a street that was built very recently (1990 I think). It's called a street but it's not really, it's a footpath built around a canal with a million shops around about. To be honest, the shops aren't worth visiting, but they do make the walk interesting. The whole place itself is beautiful, and there's a guy that is selling musical instruments, and he plays them when nobody's buying anything (which I would imagine is most of the time), and the music carries over the water and is just beautiful - you know how some music just reminds you of a
Little girl
Future Gymnast? country - this music was perfectly Chinese - it was really nice. The rest of the shops are overpriced and mostly tacky. There were a few restaurants too, which we SHOULD have gone to, instead of the Salmonella Stopoff, but now we know!
The other thing we visited was the old opera house, that the Empress built so that she could watch all the new operas either alone or with a few honoured guests. It was gigantic and awesome, and while we were there there was a performance on, so we got to listen to a few young people playing traditiona instruments. It was also very cool. I think I'm repeating superlatives in this blog - sorry for the blandness.
We finished up the day by going to a famous duck restaurant, which was co-incidentally recommended to me when we got home by somebody who read my blog, so that was pretty cool. I think it was the same one anyway. They had a live show with some acrobatics and puppets and a brilliant opera performance, it just lasted a few minutes, but the guy had a mask that could change by flicking his head...just awesome.
One
last thing, for my picky, picky, friends. I'm terribly sorry if there are spelling mistakes or grammatical errors, these are usually written between 1:00 and 2:00 AM, so there's got to be a bit of license for error! You're gonna get it when I get home Gaz!!! :-)
That's all for the day. Just a quiet one tomorrow so I won't be writing anything I don't think...we'll see how we go.
Hope everybody's well. See you soon.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.056s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0369s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
garrett willder
non-member comment
I Want the hear those traditiona instruments.