I got lucky during my week in Beijing: the weather was uncharacteristically clear and wonderful. People who are not used to Canadian climate spent a lot of time complaining about how cold it was,
but that was a load of wimpiness. After all, it never once went below freezing. During the day, I was usually in a long-sleeved shirt without a jacket. Is it *my* fault that tropical boy Rick thinks socks and sandals are "warm" footwear and that pantlegs are only for formal purposes, not for warmth? No, no it is not. Besides, it was fairly warm in the city when I got there, and all that did was make it look foggy and burn my throat. Of course, that weather system only lasted my first day, and that was before Rick and Eliezer showed up.
I was pretty happy when the tropical boys showed up, though, complaining or no complaining. I'd spent my first day going for a long wander by myself. I wanted to know what the big metal birdsnest that I could see from my room was. I figured it was construction associated with the 
Olympics (like everything else near where I was staying), and inside that metal mess was actually a stadium. Or something. Rick and I took timed exposures on our last night, and that's where the cool night pic comes from. At dusk and dawn, the whole thing glitters with all the welding activity. Google later told me that this is Beijing National Stadium. I got that from the search terms "nest" and "Beijing"...
During my exploring afternoon, I first got a better view of the nest, and then kept wandering. I liked the mobile bicycle mechanic's shop I saw next to an underpass. 
My wandering eventually took me along a very interesting looking fence and wall, and I wanted to know what was inside. I followed the wall until I found the entrance, and while I didn't really know what I was paying 90 yuan for, it seemed interesting. It turns out I found the Chinese Ethnic Culture Museum, which is also part of the Olympic construction and not yet finished. However, it has the potential to be incredibly cool: it has 55 pavilions of Chinese minority cultures (ok, 54. The Han culture is also included, but I can't see it as qualifying as "minority"!) I spent three hours wandering (until the museum closed) and decided to come back if I got a chance. More on that in a later entry...
Once Rick and Eli arrived, we devoted some time to see the big sights: Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and Jing Shan Park. We started at Tiananmen Square, and worked our way north. 
The first picture above is looking south toward the Maosoleum, and you can see the Monument to the People's Heroes in front of it. Next is the National Museum of China, which stands on the east side of Tiananmen Square. We didn't go in (the Maosoleum wasn't open, so we didn't go in there either). The kite flying there is identical to the ones we bought (one each). We realized after we bought the kites that we got taken and overpaid, and we were uninterested in buying the spool of kite string after that. Disinterest paid off, since we ended up with spools at 1/7th the original asking price. Obviously, you're a much better bargainer if you are already pissed off and disinterested... The third picture is looking north along the Imperial Way toward the Gate of Heavenly Peace (aka Tian/an Men). It is adorned by Chairman Mao's Portrait. No further comment on that. The last picture is a close-up of the National Museum.
More of the Monument to the People's Heroes and the spirit of enterprising kite sellers. We also encountered the spirit of enterprising art students, but my book had made some remarks about being approached by these clowns, so when two young men who spoke far better English than any hotel employee I encountered during my stay in Beijing started telling us about their paintings, Rick said that our book said there were a lot of art students in Tiananmen Square, why was that? They urgently needed to pee or something at that point, because poof! they were gone. The colourful detail is from Qian Men, aka the Front Gate, which is at the southern end of Tiananmen Square.
Continuing to tourist on the Square: a rather idyllic shot of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, monuments to the Three Gorges Dam and Tibet. Note the red flags flying above Tibet - a theme that was carried out all over the Square, as illustrated by yet another shot of the museum.
It looks pretty and impressive and glorious, all that red, doesn't it? There was certainly a lot of national pride present on Tiananmen Square (and the vast majority of the tourists there that day were domestic travellers). 
We couldn't really share those sentiments, and we needed to take a break. We wandered along the Forbidden City moat to get away from the Imperial Way and find some lunch. Lunch was at some hole in the wall (literally) where they were cooking rice noodles and dumplings, and we resorted to our pointing style to get some of the former and a whole lot of the latter, and we took over the small table on the street to eat. After that, we felt next to tackle the next item on our self-imposed itinerary: the Forbidden City.
The Forbidden City is old (the original version was completed in 1420) and it is big. There is something in the order of 1000 rooms (thoguh not all are open to the public). There are many areas of various meanings, but we stopped paying detailed attention to the audio guides by about the second room. You can google it yourself if you really want to know lots about it. We ended up being fascinated by much more modern things: the Starbucks, the groups of red-capped Chinese tourists following a guide. It was very pretty. The details I remember are that the the place of prolonging happiness was constructed in such a way that the happiness prolonger seemed like they were trapped inside a moat. And the number of little animals on the roof of a building indicated its importance.
We ran out of steam and enthusiasm for seeing the big sights (accompanied, of course, by many thousand other tourists) partway through the Forbidden City, but we were good and disoriented and had to spend an extra hour finding our way out. By now, we just wanted to go home, but getting to downtown 
Beijing is no easy task in the city of much traffic when you stay in a hotel far from the nearest metro station. Thus we hauled ourselves up the hill in Jing Shan Park and enjoyed the great view. There was much else to see there, but we were tired, and all other "big sights" were abandoned. We spent our remaining energy finding a taxi, in which Rick promptly fell asleep.
And that was our big tourist day. The only thing we still insisted on ticking off the Great Sights of Beijing list was the Great Wall, and we had no interest in seeing more red hats at Badaling. That story to come...
Posted by Johanna at November 25, 2006 06:04 PM