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Published: April 12th 2006
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Mao
I guess you know this is Tian'anmen Square April 3, 2006 - Beijing
This will be my last entry in the blog. Our trip has come to an abrupt end. Just as we were getting ready to leave Seoul for Beijing we got word that my father was dying - and we needed to decide what to do/when to leave back to the US. Once in Beijing we got help from our hotel, The Radisson SAS managed to get us tickets back to Denver for Monday the 3rd (I sit writing this on the plane to San Francisco). So we had 36 hours to “do” Beijing. What does one do with only 36 hours? It was 2:30pm in the afternoon. We hopped in a cab and went to the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is forbidden after 4:30 so by the time we got there we had not quite an hour. We raced through it and I would love to go back. But it is really a city, building after building Chinese pagoda style, rather and each building bigger than the one before it. Many of the buildings are getting a face lift now in way through to the south which turned out to be right across the
Mao
Chairman Mao and us street from Tian’anmen Square. So that was our next stop. We “admired” the famous huge picture of Mao, and found the sky full of very colorful kites, like we had heard of. It was fun to watch the kite flyers with their huge reels of string working the kites in the wind.
Yesterday we joined an all day tour so we would see as much as possible. We boarded a bus with quite a lot of other people, several Americans, two Chinese (not quite sure why they were on a tour), two Finnish couples, a French couple and an Australian young man. The weather was very hazy and when we asked our guide if it was pollution or cloud, she reassured us that it was not pollution, but we know it was.
Anyway, the first stop was the Ming tombs. The actual burial spot is a huge “artificial mountain” behind the structure. They buried the emperors something like 27 meters below ground and then built up the hill way above ground. It was definitely impressive.
The afternoon was spent at the Great Wall, and I must say that it was almost the most exciting experience of the
Beijing
In the Forbidden City trip - to actually be at the Great Wall and to be climbing on it. I thought before that when people said climb, they meant walk - but they didn’t - it is climbing, up and down and quite steep in places- some places flat and some places with steep steps. -and the throngs of people, totally unbelievable. I never in my life expected to see so many people there. Most of them were Chinese, but there were of course lots of tourists. Everyone was friendly and we ended up having our picture taken by lots of Chinese school children - for some reason they loved us and they all wanted their picture taken with us. We had about an hour and a half to be on the wall and the entire time was exciting. I just kept thinking that for so long I had wanted to visit China and go to the Great Wall, and there I was -
In between we had to visit three more of those awful outlets where you walk into a room filled with lots of Chinese who just want your money. The first one was a jade factory, the second a porcelain
Beijing
The Forbidden City is getting ready for the 2008 Olympics! factory and the third a silk factory. The last was actually interesting as we got to see how they soak and unwind the small cocoons for silk fabric and then soak and stretch the large cocoons for silk comforters. Of course we were all to buy silk after that, but I think only the French couple did.
We had planned on having Gunnar’s belated birthday dinner in Nairobi at the famous Carnivore restaurant, but now since we will not get there we decided to have Peking duck in Beijing as a substitute. It was great - the duck was moist and wonderful and hopefully well cooked so we don’t take Avian flu home with us as a souvenir. It is the only poultry we ate in Asia - we were probably being paranoid, but who knows? The Austrian woman had signed on to her conference as a vegetarian just so she wouldn’t be served poultry.
So dear readers, this is the end. The trip we had was wonderful and hopefully some other time we will make it back to China and to Africa. But family comes first and family is calling.
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