Beijing - Day 1, Part 2

Apr 24, 2014

Day 1, Part 2

After navigating through the depths of the Forbidden City, we encounter the Imperial garden that was built during the Ming dynasty. The garden is enormous with centuries-old trees and rocks, shaped in peculiar ways.

Most of the doors/gates have this every pretty flower-like pattern on it. Chinese tend to like the color red because it symbolizes prosperity, luck and happiness. I know, cause I am Chinese. (๑´ㅂ`๑)

Throughout the garden you'll find these rocks everywhere. Also, there are so many tourists that make it utterly difficult to snap a picture without them in the background.

 Centuries-old tree. 

After leaving the Imperial Garden, we headed off for lunch.The outside scenery of the Forbidden City was just magnificent, befitting of an emperor, with the palace surrounded by water.

And this is the place that we went for lunch at. You will see a lot of tour groups at every single lunch and dinner restaurant. It's like the restaurant are built just to serve us. Every time you are at the restaurant there will be BEER; apparently, beer is cheaper than Pepsi or 7-up.

After lunch we headed of to the "Summer Palace of the Qing Dynasty" which is another imperial garden, but built in the Qing dynasty. We only had 30-40 minutes here which was not a lot of time. The tour guide just wanted to bring us to a Chinese herb shop, which we were in for at least an hour. It sucks. You can barely see anything in that short amount of time, I would say at least 2 hours is needed to really appreciate the garden. It is gigantic with many courtyards, temples, bridges, etc. 

 There was this old man writing a poem? on the ground with a gigantic paintbrush with water.

 There was this super long corridor that stretches on forever! We did not walk to the very end because we didn't have enough time before we had to meet up with the tour again, and as far as I can see we were nowhere near the end. Apparently, if they lose you, or if you are not back in time, they are allowed to leave you. There are ancient pictures on the wood of the corridor and each picture is different, I wonder how long it took to build this and paint this.

 

I wanted to climb up the hill to see this temple :'(

No time thanks to the money-grabbing tour guide.

 

After visiting the Summer Palace we went for dinner. One thing I hate about restaurants in China is that even though it says "NO SMOKING", people still smokes yet the employees does not stop them. Last stop after dinner was an acrobatic show, which I thought was pretty good. There was a lot of dancing, great music and tricks. Unfortunately, my mother fell asleep even though I was nudging her every once in a while. At the end, she couldn't stand it and went out since the dark was just making her sleepy. I would say 90% of customers at the shows was thanks to the tour groups. We got back to the hotel around 10:30PMish and we were beyond exhausted, fell asleep snoring.