China Day Two

On our second day in China we started out at 7AM for a breakfast buffet in our hotel, which consisted of eggs, huge slaps of what they call bacon but they were more like ham slices that looked like bacon, and breads. No real Chinese food to speak of. Christine was not impressed with the breakfast spread but they would more than make up for it with the lunches and dinners to follow.

This is one of the many bicycle apparatuses we saw driving around Beijing.

Its amazing how many different vehicles you can attach to a bike still be road worthy. Well at least propel forward on a road.

We started our tourist day at Tiananmen Square. It is a huge place, with a monument in the center, similar to our war memorials in Washington. It is directly across the street from the Forbidden Palace, which was our next stop on the tour.

This was also our first introduction to the street vendors. Everything sold on the street is up for negotiations. The first vendor offered to sell us some post cards of all the famous sites in China, our guide jumped right in for us and bargained them down from wherever they started to about two dollars American. I don’t remember what price they started at but it was well over ten dollars. Our guide, James, proved to be very good at this and was very helpful the entire trip.

Here you can see just how hazy it was the entire trip. This picture is mostly for reference, I tried to correct the rest.

We then walked across (well under) the street to the Forbidden Palace. Its called the Forbidden Palace because it was never opened to the commoners, only to royalty.

This is the Forbidden City.

We then went to the Summer Palace. This is where the Emperor would go in Summers of course. Here they have the longest corridor in the world. It's huge, and winding. We were told from the air it resembles the wings of a bat, with a palace as the body of the bat.

This is the Summer Palace.
This is the long corridor that I mentioned. This photo does not do it justice, as it is at least a mile long.This is the palace that makes up the body of the bat, the long corridor stretches to the left and right of it.
This is the boat that takes you out on the lake. We took a boat just like this across the lake to the beginning so we didn't have to walk all the way back to the beginning of the Summer Palace. That was very nice. This is a close up of the Palace mentioned above.
This is a boat made almost entirely of Marble. The beams holding it up are actually made of wood with either a faux marble finish, or just painted and weathered to look like Marble.





Stay tuned for days 3 through 6...