Forbidden City

Today in Beijing it is cool sunny, and clear..the polution is bad, you can see a rather healthy smog on the city, but it is just like Mexico City on a bad day. I had a sinus headache at the beginning of today, but it went away by mid morning and I haven't had any breathing problems.

So this is a city in the middle of Beijing where the Ming and Qing emporers held court. It is a 100,00 sq meters collassus. We thought that we would be done in about half a day...we spent 7 hours there and had to skip a few spots. We were able to see most of it, but had to skip the far eastern edge. The place is divided up into separate courts and mini halls and palaces and all is breathtakingly amazing.

All the buildings and walls are painted red, and the roofs are covered with ornate animals and painted gold--this combination of gold and red was reserved only for the Palace grounds.The front entrance is huge, with multiple enomouse courtyards, each at least a few football field long and deep. Hear the armies would gather before going off to war, at the center are two lavishly ornate building where the emporer would hang out and give directives--all decisions final, no appeal.

The whole area is divided up into separate courtyards, where there would be rooms, and stages. Most are where the Emporer had his concubines. Three times a year he would select multiple girls from the daughters of his court people. They say that most had between 2,000 and 3,000 concubines. Now some of those girls where just for decoration, like ladies in waiting, and the emporer just had a few with whom he shared "relations" I meant the guy wasn't Wilt Chamberlin. From there the girls could actually work their way up to emporess, or cheif concubine, both with tremendous power.

Another cool fact was that although the emporer's official residence was the biggest and grandest Palace in the center of the city, or called the Palace ofLongevity, some of them would choose to live in a small palace in one of the corners of the city, just because he liked it there, or one of them lived in one of the pavilions in the garden aftyer he retired to write poetry.

Oh yeah, the garden, it was mostly made up of these weird shaped rock formations and these strange hybrid trees that they developed and was surrounded by 400 year old chinese cypress trees.


After we left the Forbidden City, we ran into these really nice chinese girls who started talking to us. They asked us where we were going, and we said to get something to eat--they asked if they could join us, we said yes. They took us to this Tea House. We all drank tea and watched a tea ceremony, ate some dumplings and chicken wings...then the bill came and it was 2,000 yuan or about $260. The girls said that they would split it, so we paid $130 for some tea and snacks. I have this gift credit card from selling copiers that we were able to use, so it really didn't cost us anything, but it was a good leason learned.