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Published: October 26th 2012
It was always going to be hard to follow up on such an amazing day at The Great Wall, but we had heard so much about the Forbidden City in Beijing we had to visit it and see for ourselves what all the fuss was about. With blue skies and sunshine once again, we walked there via Tian'amen Square, which for such an open space has quite a serious mood and Soviet influences were still clearly present in the guise of guards everywhere and a silent but obvious tension, but many say that China still carries this under-current and this is one of the places it is most seen. We carried on walking until we finally reached the entrance to The Forbidden City, also known as The Palace Museum.
The Forbidden City is a vast walled complex and was the Chinese Imperial Palace from the Ming and Qing Dynasty's. It is named so as for over 500 years it was out of bounds for anyone to enter (doing so would lead to immediate execution) except for the Emperors who lived in it and the Government. It consists of several large and decorative halls, temples and buildings which contain original artwork
and furniture from the 14th Century, and whilst we liked walking through these for a few hours and learning about the history of Beijing via an audio tour, it was not really as impressive as we expected for all the hype we had read/heard about, and the crowds of Chinese tour groups were insane.
On the subject of the Chinese, generally we have found them to be very friendly and always willing to help even if they don't quite understand us, they are usually smiley and welcoming too, but over the last 2 weeks we have made several observations about them which we overlooked at first, but now have become so apparent we wanted to share them with you...we are aware we are generalising here but having seen the frequency of the below we feel we can write about it here...
Firstly, they love to sleep. All the time. We have seen people of various ages napping and sleeping in Museums, parks, on the metro, in the middle of a loud bar, in shops and even in McDonalds. They really must be a tired bunch.
Secondly, there doesn't seem to be any middle ground with people. Either
they have near perfect English or they don't speak a word, they are super smiley and friendly or really stern and serious, they are really loud or deadly silent, etc etc. Just a bit strange we have found.
Next, they love to have extra loud shouty conversations on the phone or with eachother, and often in inappropriate places - whether on a sleeper bus/train in the middle of the night, in the middle of a temple/museum, in restaurants or just on the street right next to you. They don't seem to be able to have converstations quietly.
Queing just isn't in their culture - they don't queue to get on buses, to get into sites or pay for tickets - they just push and shove their way to the front! Saying that, when they get off the metro they will happily queue (re-push) for ages in a crowd to get on the escalator up, insted of walking the empty stairs...
Then there are the tour groups...Chinese people don't seem to comprehend travelling alone/not as part of a tour group. They look at us strangely in hostels when we decline their tours in favour of going it alone.
The tour groups we have seen are often huge and loud, lead by a mega-phone toting leader, bringing noise and disruption to every imaginable site and ruining the peace.
Some of the clothing the women wear to historical ancient sites is pretty inappropriate we find - sky high heels on The Great Wall, tight pleather hotpants round the Forbidden City, camel-toe inducing tights with a too-short top (not leggings, actual 60 denier black tights) in temples, and even the kids are at it - they have holes cut out of their trousers and don't wear nappies so their parents can hold them up when they need 'to go', whenever and wherever needed, be it on the street, in a public place or on the metro...nice.
Lastly, there's the spitting. OMG the spitting! It's unreal - not just a quiet clearing of the throat, but a full on noisy chest phlegming hock which they then spit out on the floor - mainly in the street, but we have also seen this on trains, buses and bars. Its just gross and there is no need and they do it all the time!
Anyway, moving on...
After the day
at The Forbidden City we went to a night market in search of some good local food, as we have been quite dissapointed with Chinese food so far (except for the first few days in Yangshuo). I mean, we knew it would be different to at home and we were really looking forward to trying new things, but what we have seen in the last few days is just a step too far for us. In our hostel they do a good sweet & sour chicken, and the beef with mushrooms and peppers is nice, but outside in the restaurants its a whole different ball game. Donkey meat stew, fried chicken feet or blood soup anyone? No us neither! Those are standard dishes we have seen on most menus, as well as these classic translations - explosion of the kidneys, the cucumber ate the silk pork, ass giblet soup, intestines of the sheep, flesh and bones chicken and the eggplant walks the balls...now can you see why we have had McDonalds a few times?!
The night market was actually pretty cool and we got to try some 'normal' local dishes, such as spicy fried noodles, beef and vegetable pancakes,
dumplings and skewered lamb which were all tasty and cheap. There were of course a few things we didn't fancy trying, especially the things on a stick - we saw skewered shark, snake, cockroaches, starfish, horse, lamb, pork, chicken, pineapple, scorpion - seems like anything on a stick goes here. So along with the duck on the first night we have had some nice food, we just wish there was more of it! We are hoping the food improves over the next few days which we have heard it will in Xi'an and once we hit the Sichuan region.
On our 4th full day in Beijing we took the metro to the North West area of the city to see the Summer Palace, a World Heritage site which we both loved and really enjoyed spending the day in. Once a playground for the Beijing royals and Emperors, the features inside the Summer Palace are a marvel of open air landscpaing. Again it was a sunny day and the gardens here were stunning so we spent hours wandering through them, alongside the scenic pagoda's, bridges and temples in the grounds here, all of which lead down to the huge Kunming
Lake and the impressive Marble Boat. We stopped for a quick bite to eat of dumplings and an ice cream admiring the views before heading back to the top of the park (via an unoffical path which we scrambled up to avoid paying another entry fee) to the exit. Upon leaving we were happy to find some stalls selling yummy looking street food, so we had a chicken salad pancake/wrap and a large sweet potato, both of which were yummy, before jumping back on the metro.
Inspired by the 2012 Olympic games in London earlier this year, we decided we should see the home of the 2008 Beijing games and headed to 'The Birds Nest', the national stadium which hosted the main track events. Something we noticed as soon as we got off the metro at 'Olympic Green' was how modern and clean this part of the city was, obviously created to show off to the world when the games took place, it was in stark contrast to the rest of the city which has a traditional and ancient feel to it. The stadium was cool to see and after a few photos and a look at the other
arenas we were back on the metro to our hostel after another full on day.
Our last day in Beijing was spent at The Temple of Heaven, a UNESCO site encompassed by a high wall which is home to acres of lush gardens and has a very tranquil feel to it. We have been so lucky with the warm weather here (except on our first day) and it really makes walking round these outdoor sites a pleasure. We came to a park type area where we were astounded to see loads of groups of people dancing, stretching and shuffling (some even walked backwards or jumped around) to various classical music coming from several speakers, i-phones and boom boxes - it was so random as they were each doing their own thing (either on their own, in pairs or in a group) with various degrees of rythym, we couldn't help have a giggle but they seemed to be enjoying themselves. This isn't the first type of mass dancing we have seen in Beijing - a lady started doing it in a cafe in front of us and outside a shop yesterday a group of ladies just started doing a jig
on the street - they obviously love to dance! Also in the park as we continued to walk towards the Temple of Good Harvest (main feature), we noticed that it seemed quite popular for people to hold impromptu 'gigs', where they would come complete with music and microphone and belt out tuneless songs to crowds of people who seemed to be lapping it up - but to us it ranged from slightly below mediocre to a racket of cat calls - they definately wouldn't make it through on X Factor! We spent a while in the Temple of Good Harvest which is a round pavillion/pagoda with a square base (quite rare) in the centre of the park, which represents the notion that Heaven is round and Earth is square, before walking through the Echo Wall (didn't seem to echo much) and leaving to go back to our hostel in the afternoon.
After a jam-packed few days in the Chinese capital, our time in Beijing had sadly come to an end. Even though it had a more Soviet-type atmosphere in some parts and the least amount of English we have seen in China yet, we really enjoyed getting to know
this incredible city and learn about it's historical past, and climbing The Great Wall has been a real highlight of our trip so far. But it was now time to move on, so we made our way to the colossal Beijing West train station for our 2nd sleeper train of the trip to the town of Datong 6 hours away...
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rosy59
Rosemary
Am enjoying reading your blogs, I'm teaching in Jinan Shandong Province and will be going to Beijing next weekend and visiting the wall of course, your comments have been helpful, thanks