Beijing Day 2 Tiananmen Square, Temple of Heaven, Forbidden City

Below is my take on the day. Carlen blogged about the day as well at Palace in the Trees. Feel free to visit his post and share your comments!

Hotel breakfast buffet a nice mix of western and eastern items. Waffle, omelette, and noodle stations as well. I asked for an omelette and ended up with a bowl of something that was definitely not an omelette… tried it anyway.

We were expecting to be part of a larger group for our tour but turns out we have a private guide and driver! Makes our touring much more natural and self-paced. Our guide, Candy, is a real sweetheart and the driver deserves a badge of courage for the way he navigates the streets, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians. Cars have the right of away, not pedestrians and they make lanes as they want squishing between or in-front of cars willy-nilly. Nevertheless there seems to be some mutually recognized strategy as we saw only one fender bender and never hear any sirens.

The city is enormous – massive streets with massive buildings sprawling over a massive area. Whereas New York has a huge concentration of tall buildings in a small area, Beijing has much wider streets with far more lanes; buildings half the size but ten times the footprint, and crazier traffic without the road rage.

Our first stop was Tiananmen Square, the huge flat public space flanked by the Great Hall of the People serving a similar function as Canada’s parliament, the Mao Zedong’s Mausoleum, and the iconic gate to the Forbidden City. I spent most of the time there remembering the images from 1989’s protests appreciating even more the sense of time and place.

Next stop was a walk through the Forbidden City. Another amazing site in which you could spend days looking and thinking about everything that has gone on there over the last 600 years. One thing I appreciated was that there is very little commerce there, compared to Chichén Itzá where we had to run a gauntlet of vendors (and I do appreciate the cooperation between the state conservancy and local citizens in setting up a space for local people to earn something from the tourists), the Forbidden City was virtually free of commerce.

Artist in Temple of the Sun Park

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Many gathered around to watch this artist paint, but the cutest was this little girl.

Lunch was delicious and plentiful then we were off to a Pearl Factory for the vending of some pearl things – Carlen got to fish out an oyster from a tank then see they opened it up so we could see the pearls made inside. Didn’t realize that a single freshwater oyster could produce more than a dozen or more pearls at a time. Following that we were off to the Temple of Heaven for a walk around the park then up to the temple. Another ornately decorated structure high on a hill giving a great view of modern Beijing beyond standing in stark contrast with the historic setting nearby.

We had a little time to kill before supper so Candy took us to a grocery store – easily as interesting and memorable an experience as everything else we had done to that point. It seemed each aisle and display had someone shouting out what was for sale there. The meat and fish area had a fascinating array of fresh, frozen, and still-living items. Little of it was packaged and there were disposable gloves you could use to handle the meat but many people didn’t seem to bother with them.

Later we went across the street for our Peking Duck dinner – none of us were really very hungry and we were embarrassed at the amount of food brought to the table. This one was a little more of an adventure and included duck wings in a brown gelatin. I did try one… just one; not quite my thing, but the rest was delicious. We followed supper with the Legend of Kung Fu story – weren’t going to at first because of the cost but we are glad we did; it was quite a production and there were some pretty amazing sights.

Back at the hotel after a long day touring and sight-seeing we crashed pretty quickly.