The Forbidden City

29. April 2008 by ilanamong.

The Forbidden City is a huge complex with about 800 buildings and 8,000 rooms. It is located right in the middle of Beijing, across the street from Tian’anmen Square. The emperors during the Ming and Qing Dynasties lived here from the 1400s until the last emperor in the early 1900s. It is surrounded by a moat and has huge wooden doors so enemies could be kept out. The roofs are all yellow tiles that symbolize royalty. As we walked through, you pass through lots of different gates and large spaces called things like Hall of Preserving Harmony, Palace of Heavenly Purity, and Hall of Mental Cultivation. A lot of areas are setup like museums with different things that were in the palace, like jewelry, pottery, weapons, clothing and crowns, and bowls and plates used during ceremonies and everyday.

You are not allowed to take pictures inside, but I saw a whole lot of jade statues–I liked the dragons the best. I also really liked a golden tea set that was really, really fancy. In one area, they had really cool huge model cities set up with hundreds of people, buildings, and animals from ancient times. There were also a bunch of big stones called drums that had Chinese writing and pictures carved into them. These were from around 300 BC and you could still see most of the carvings. On the wall, they showed the Chinese characters from the carving and what those same characters look like today–a lot of them were very much the same. There was a marble pathway down the center of the city that only the emperor was allowed on. Everyone else, even the empress, had to walk on the side pathways.

When we finished up with The Forbidden City, we took a taxi to a noodle restaurant. We had a difficult time finding an empty taxi and it was really hot out today. When we finally got one, we were stuck in traffic for a long time and then the taxi driver couldn’t find the restaurant. Finally, at 2:30 in the afternoon, we arrived for lunch. It was worth the wait. We ordered little chopsticks, which are long, thickish noodles that are thicker at one end and thinner at the other end like a chopstick. We also had cats ears, which are little noodles shaped liked cats ears. The restaurant was the most modern place we have been yet. If we had arrived during the regular lunch area, we could have sat downstairs in the bar area where they make the noodles in front of you. That would have been interesting.

We are getting a little better at communicating with people, but it still is mostly just pointing. Sometimes nodding your head yes does not mean the same thing here as it does at home, so even that doesn’t work all the time. I know how to say hello (Ni Hao), thank you (pronounced like shay shay), and tea (cha). I know the characters for Beijing–there are two of them. I can’t really read any of the signs, even though they have the pinyin (spelled out–not Chinese characters). There are some signs in English, but not too many. In the tourist areas, they have all the signs in Chinese and English. If you don’t read either of those, you are out of luck.

When you get a menu in a restaurant, the waitress waits at the table for you to tell her what you want. There is no time to look through the menu and sometimes it is a really big menu. So, it’s best to have an idea of what you want before you even go into the restaurant. We’ve learned that it’s not rude to make the waitress wait while you take your time.

The high school kids all want to speak a few words of English to us. They ask where we are from and if we are enjoying our trip. The school kids all wear bright colored sweat suits as their school uniforms.

Also, wherever we go, people want to take pictures of us with them, especially my brother Alex. It happens about 5 times a day. Sometimes they just have their video camera on us as we are walking around. They are always very nice about it and it doesn’t seem rude, but I don’t think we would take pictures of people who look different at home. There are not too many Americans or Europeans here, even in our American hotel. A lot of people are surprised that my parents have two children because in China they can only have one.

Today was really hot and humid, about 88 degrees. The rest of the week is supposed to be the same. Luckily, there hasn’t been any rain since the first couple of days. Tomorrow is my dad’s birthday and we are going out for a big dim sum brunch–I can’t wait since we skipped dinner tonight because we had a late lunch.

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