The next morning, we meet up for breakfast at the hotel restaurant. It's a really good buffet that we'll continue eating for breakfast each day of our stay. The signs identifying food all have trivial pursuit pie pieces next to them indicating if they're high fiber, low fat, high energy, or "Big Time." E decides that obviously big time is the best category.
The hotel is walking distance from Tian'anmen Square, which includes the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. During morning hours, the Hall is open to the public if you are willing to go through enough security checkpoints. To get onto the square, we feed our bags to an X-ray machine and are waved over with wands. Before we can get into the line, we have to go back across the street to check our bags, which are not permitted in the hall. This information is provided by one of the helpful people there for a small fee. Information asymmetry is profitable and everyone knows it. We wait in line to go through metal detectors and have our ID's checked before being shuffled quickly through the building. In the foyer is a large statue of the chairman which several people have stopped at in order to place flowers. The hallway opens to a large glassed in space with several armed guards that contains a smaller glass box with the preserved body of Mau Zedong. At no point after entering the building do we stop moving forward until we've been ejected from the other side.
From there, we head to the north side of the square and enter the Forbidden City through the Meridian Gate. From this entrance we walked through a series of vast open spaces where halls surround ornate buildings separated by additional gates.
All sorts of interesting statues of mythical creatures, but Bill's favorite is this descendant of a turtle and a dragon:
At the bases of many stairways are pairs of fu dogs. One always has a ball and the other is always playing with a baby dog:
One of the plaques tells us that this symbolizes that the young is always with the old and that dogs like to play with balls. Aside from the tall red walls, every inch of everything is covered in detail. There's more to see in each room of the city than a person can really take in on a single visit.
The palace structures are set up with artifacts from the Ming and Qing dynasties with entrances fences off. The ceilings are all intricate as are the floors and furniture. I enjoy fighting my way to the front of a couple of them for a closer look. Our tour eventually takes us through the imperial garden and residences and to a hall containing the first telephone in the empire. Most but not all of the city has been restored and opened to the public with some buildings open and containing small exhibits of jewelry or pottery or other items from imperial times.
Some spaces have also been converted into coffee and snack shops and souvenir shops. These are actually the nicest souvenir shops we'll see on this entire trip, but we have far too much to see to waste any time in them.
The northeastern section is accessible for an additional fee. We enter pretty late in the afternoon. It is off season and most things close early during these cold, windy winter months.
The nine dragons are at one edge of a portion of the city that is still being restored. Heading north from them are a series of squares with some really interesting exhibits including large stone drums with poetry carved into them and several of these giant carvings covered in details of forests, buildings, people, and animals.
We leave as they're closing down for the day exiting through the Gate of Divine Might on the north side of the square and head East along the moat surrounding the Forbidden City.
As we make our way back to the hotel, we stop to take some pictures of a car E's father used to own. Some other people stop and ask Bill if they can take a picture with him. The tour book says to not be surprised by this since it's not uncommon for people to get their picture taken with westerners, like you're Brad Pitt or the elephant man.
We stop in a department store for snacks to carry on tomorrow's adventure. The mall, adjacent to our hotel, has a restaurant specializing in dumplings. Some are fried, some are steamed, and all are delicious.
After dinner we head back out to visit Ten Fu's Tea in Wangfujin, which had been closing up as we'd entered yesterday. We sit at the counter and tried a series of interesting teas prepared by a young lady taking a large amount of tea and mixing it in a lidded tea cup with a small amount of water to brew it quickly. Some are really good with a wide range of price points. Only one is not to my liking with a sort of grassy flavor. Y's mother and I each pick out a few things. I purchase a jasmine, a flowering jasmine and a rose tea and spend just enough to be rewarded with a gift box containing one of the lidded cups and six of the smaller tasting cups use for the tastings.
We head back to the hotel for a good night's rest as tomorrow will be another big day.
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