Alot of walking in the Forbidden City!

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Well, we are thoroughly exhausted now and I think Nanny has never done quite so much walking in all her life! Yet another early start and we arrived at the back door of the Forbidden City by 9am. The weather was a little chillier today, but still perfect for being a tourist! Mum is reading snippets from the guide book right now and it is making much of our day make sense now as we were more than amazed by the size of the whole place. We walked and walked for hours and barely saw half of it, we are sure. Apparently, the imperial household consisted of upwards of 6000 members with a Palace Guard of up to 6000 men, so when we were thinking it would be an empty and desolate place, we were very wrong. Oh, and there were at least 70,000 eunuchs!!!

Anyway, the Forbidden City was just beautiful, with so many interesting corners and ornately decorated buildings. We stopped for coffees half way through the morning in a cute little coffee shop, then carried on to visit the Treasure where the jewellery was housed, just alongside the 'Nine Dragon Wall'. We got lost a few times (although Ian claims to have known exactly where to go the whole time!) but eventually made it through to the final corridor where we got carried along with the swell of the crowd through the front entrance to emerge out onto Tiananmen Square. None of us could believe how massive the square is.....it was absolutely heaving with people. The whole experience was indescribable and we have all been discussing how we can't believe how much we have fitted in over the past 3 days. Sadly, Ian had to fly back to Shanghai this evening as he is back at work tomorrow. We have a day of relaxing planned tomorrow to try and recover from our mass amounts of walking, then we are going to see some more sights at the end of the week.....depending on how our legs recover of course!!

To be honest, I think I should just put the photos up and stop waffling on.

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