The trip got off to a rough start when we were headed to the airport in Shanghai to catch the flight to Beijing. Because we know there is always a probability of traffic, we left for the airport several hours ahead of time. But the extra hours were pointless. We were stuck in so much traffic for so long that we only arrived at the airport 20 minutes before our flight. And this isn’t any little Montgomery, Alabama or Kalamazoo, Michigan airport. This place is huge….and a madhouse. To make a long story short, I cornered a airline worker, explained the situation, (I say explained. It was more like waving my arms and grunting until he got the idea.) He rushed us through the check-in process and we made it on the plane with only seconds to go. They shut the doors right, and I mean right behind us as we took our seats at the very back of the plane. Right when we should have begun to taxi they made an announcement. Being that the announcement was all in Chinese we had no idea what was being said. We assumed it was the usual pre-takeoff spiel. But at the conclusion of the babble, all of the passengers, minus us, groaned. That couldn’t be good. Ends up, we had to park it on the runway for an hour! But we eventually made it to Beijing.
After finally arriving and a couple, actually many, problems at the hotel we ended up having a great rest of the trip. Except for the darn rain!
This is us being tourists again. We are so good at getting around Shanghai now despite the language barrier we were not expecting to have problems in Beijing. I mean, we speak some Chinese. Enough to let taxi drivers know where we want to go. Or enough to ask a local for directions. But the Shanghai version of Mandarin is nothing like the Beijing version of Mandarin. The dialect difference is nothing compared to what we have in the States. Anyway....we were lost!!
We toured a Jade factory while in Beijing where they make Jade...well everythings! This is the boys and a ship carved out of ONE piece of stone. Really amazing!
There are some things I have seen in my life that I thought would be really impressive or amazing, but ended up not being so. But, I can honestly say that the Great Wall is just as amazing or even more so than I ever thought it could be. Even in the cold rain!
After we left the Great Wall, we went to see the Bird's Nest and Water Cube. The two main Olympic buildings. I won't post any pictures of those. As it was raining thus my pictures we not that good and you can google it and see great pictures anytime. :-) Even in the cold rain those two buildings were very impressive! We were glad to lay our eyes on them.
We also visited the Forbidden City. It was SO huge. Way bigger than I thought it would be. And pretty amazing! It is a, 720,000 square meter or 7,750,015 square feet, rectangle. We spent half of the day walking through it and probably only saw about 1/3 of the City. In the rain!
Just for your information, the Forbidden City was the imperial home of 24 emperors of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.
This is Tiananmen Square. Seeing it like this, with people just milling around, it is hard to imagine the sadness that took place here. On several occasions protests and riots have taken place here with the most famous one being 1989 when between 2000-3000 people were killed.
1 comment:
People kept asking me if Beijing was as polluted as they heard. I told them no but that it was also raining the entire time. I was wrong. I think the rain was probably a good thing for us. I watch the Olympics and see the gray skies on a "clear" day. Ugh. That can't be good.
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