Beijing Day 4 – 9/29

Anne and I decided since we had been so productive on are trip so far we would reward ourselves by sleeping in an extra hour or two before our next adventure today (we are not morning people). I also forgot to mention that yesterday we ate Beijing Roast Duck for dinner. It is Chinese delicacy that Beijing is known for. The duck is carved in front of you traditionally with each cut of meat having some skin on it. You than put the duck in a flour crepe and add some dark sauce with some Chinese onion and eat it like a fajita. I have always been a fan of Beijing Kao Ya (Roast Duck in Chinese – in case you want to come here and order it) and so I gorged myself. This was another reason we decided to sleep in as I was in a food induced coma.

Off to the Summer Palace. Note this is the “new” Summer Palace as it was built in 1750 as the Old Summer Palace was apparently not good enough anymore. Apparently emperors like to build two summer homes so they can always say “let’s not go to that one, let’s go to the good one”. Sorry folks, as a big Family Guy fan (it is an animated TV show) I am mandated to sneak in at least one quote. Anyway, the Summer Palace is huge. We have come to realize that the Chinese like walking since everything they build takes more than a few hours to see. Fortunately for us over half of the Summer Palace is water, in the form of a large lake. So we cut down on walking by talking a boat ride.



Next stop the Old Summer Palace. Since it is close to the Summer Palace (around a mile or 2) none of the taxi drivers wanted to take us. We wanted to save our walking for the historical sites decided to take a rickshaw as it only cost 4 kuài/yuán (the Chinese dollar). On the ride there Anne kept saying that this poor man having to bike us big Americans 2 miles for just 4 kuài, what a hard life. She decided to give him a 10 kuài tip. Warning! Warning! You are once again about to learn something so if you haven’t yet had your morning coffee I suggest you move on to the next paragraph. In Mandarin sì is 4 and shí is 10. Sì shí being 40. Apparently this rickshaw drive pronounced his 10s, more like 4s and so we found out that the trip was to be 40 kuài per person. Here is a price comparison for you, our taxi ride home was 61 kuài for 7+ mile drive through heavy traffic and 68.3 kuài is the rough equivalent to 10 US dollars. Needless to say the rickshaw driver did not get a tip.

The Old Summer Palace started pretty. It had more of a park feel than the large buildings at the Summer Palace. Looking at our 10 Kuài map we saw pictures of many beautiful ancient builds and we were hoping we could see all of them before it got dark (in around 1 and half hours). Well, we need not worry as we found out that most of the Old Summer Palace was destroyed by the Anglo-French. Actually I know that, but was told the ruins were quite pretty. Apparently the Chinese didn’t think so as now most of the ruins are grounded rubble no taller then your knees. So our stay at the Old Summer Palace amounted to only an hour or so.