Beijing Day 3 – 9/28

Today we went to the Forbidden City (also called the Palace Museum). It was the home to 24 emperors and is just north of Tiananmen Square. For any of you readers who feel particularly motivated (or bored) feel free to check out many of the sites on have and will mention at wikipedia.com. Many the sites we visited have a lot of information listed there. In the interest of not forcing you to learn anything I will try to keep anything educational to a minimum. I thought there were a lot of people visiting the site, but Anne was quick to point out that it was not many by Chinese standards – meaning you could move most of the time without being touched by people on all sides. I did want to mention that like all things in China this “city” was rightfully named. It encompasses a very large area.

We walked to a small park (Jingshan Park) right behind the Forbidden City for some elevated pictures. It was smoggy so the pictures didn’t come out as good as we would have liked. Note – both Beijing and Shanghai are very smoggy to the point were you can almost never tell whether it is going to rain or not.

We then went to the Luilichang Cultural Street based on recommendations. Basically it is around a half mile street designed to sell you cultural items. It looked much more interesting online than in person. After a quick stroll we took a taxi to our last cultural relic the Temple of Heaven

The Temple of Heaven was a Taoist complex where the emperors went for annual ceremonies of prayer to Heaven for good harvests. It may encompass more space than the Forbidden City it has much less buildings and far more trees and park like areas. To our absolute amusement we saw some local mistrals serenading a crowd with strange (I am assuming ancient Chinese) instruments. Care to guess what they might have been playing?

A. An Ancient lullaby for the last emperor of China – Puyi

B. A solemn song of meditation played when the Emperors visited this site to pray

C. The Christmas song – Jingle Bells.

Well, if you guessed C, I would not have believed you until I was there, but yes it was none other then the captivating Christmas jingle. So please, in order to get the full effect of the experience I would encourage you to sing the song as you enjoy the pictures.