Peace and Supreme Harmony


Sunday 7th January 2007
At the Forbidden City today. Very impressive and massive. Walked miles within the walls, halls and palaces of the Forbidden City seeing the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Palace of Heavenly Purity, Hall of Union and Imperial Garden, amongst many other things. It’s the buildings that are most impressive with far fewer artefacts than you might expect. That may be because a number of the buildings are being renovated further, presumably because of the coming Olympic games. (Forgot to mention that yesterday we passed the Olympic stadium which is being built – nicknamed the Birds Nest because the top of the building looks like one – must be some connection with bird’s nest soup here!).

Many of the exhibitions were in temporary halls, we think, and although we had the ‘audio guide’ to listen to on the way round, it is much more difficult to get beneath the skin of anything here because no-one really has any Enlgish at all. And even in the Forbidden City – very busy on a Sunday with tourists – there were very, very few Westerners. Probably saw around a dozen all day. Must be different in the summer. In the restaurant last night, for example, the menu was totally in Chinese and although a big, quite classy restaurant with loads of staff, not one spoke a single word of English and couldn’t even understand when I tried to order tea at the end of the meal. All very friendly and smiley and try to be helpful though.

That’s another thing – not surprising really in a country with a population of 1.3 billion, and a city of about 15 million, there is no labour shortage! People cleaning streets everywhere (immaculately clean city) loads of ‘guards’ on everything in all kinds of different uniforms, all very official looking but we can’t tell who are policemen, who are soldiers, who are ‘street wardens’ or whatever else they may be. We were very pleased with ourselves, because after the Forbidden City, we decided to rest our aching feet and try to get the tube back the two stops to our hotel. We’ve walked everywhere since we’ve been here. We managed the tube, bought the tickets, found the right line and arrived where we thought we would, about 100 yards from hotel. Quite an achievement, helped by the tube lines being written in Chinese as well as English. Not so this morning, when we tried to find the tourist office where we need to collect our train tickets for Xian tomorrow night. We walked round and round and round and because we only have the address in our alphabet, no-one we asked could read it and give us directions. In the morning, we’ll get our hotel to ring them, give them the address in Mandarin, so that they can then get us a cab there and tell the cab driver where we want to go. But even that will be a challenge. All good fun. Tonight we’re off to sample the famous Beijing Duck at the oldest restaurant that has been serving it since 1846.

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