In Which We Dodge Some Scammers

Our third day in China was spent seeing some of the most famous things in Beijing. Namely Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City. One of the first things that we learned is that you have to have your bag go through and x-ray machine to get on the subway in China. Who knew? Turns out that security checks are pretty much a fact of life over there. They had them at just about every tourist site. Another thing that's a fact of life there? Crowding. Holy junk. There are far too many people in China. The subway was crowded, the tourist sites were crowded, the streets were crowded! So many people! Anyway, Tian'anmen Square was pretty cool. I've wanted to see it since I learned about what was there and what happened. After a slight misstep where I tried to take a camera into Mao's mausoleum (though the security guards were surprisingly friendly and polite) we got in and got to see the great dictator's dead body, which Nancy thought would look like a mummy. It didn't. Here are some pictures we took there.

First look a the square. We came from the south.

Gate

This is a statue.

Mao's Mausoleum

It was a really sunny day. 

Famous banner.

It was cold and the sun was in her eyes.

After that we headed across the street to the Forbidden City, which they call the Palace Museum these days. It was pretty cool. We only had to dodge a couple people trying to scam us on our way there. One guy said he was an art student, which is something that our guidebook warned us about specifically. There were also a couple tour guides, but they were dissuaded surprisingly easily. The palace itself was pretty sweet. The place is HUGE! I mean seriously, I thought the Korean kings liked their space, the Chinese emperor was obviously obsessed with having plenty of space! We didn't come close to seeing everything, but we saw a lot. We also took a side trip to see the hall of clocks, where they keep all of the cool old clocks that different countries sent to the emperor of China. There were some interesting ones in there. We even got to see them make a couple of them work, which was cool. Here are some pictures from the Forbidden City.

I think this is the front gate, where we had to go through another security check.

Nancy with the first building.

Frozen moat thing.

Lion! I think this thing is supposed to be famous or something.

I think this is the main, most famous building. It's pretty impressive.

And then we put the camera on top of a garbage can and took a picture of ourselves.

This is obviously a dragon turtle, like the one in Avatar.

Some Russian girls took a picture of us with the dragon turtle.

This originally held water to put out fires, which were a really big problem in ancient China. Something about wooden buildings and candles, I think.

We actually managed to get close enough to one of the throne chambers to take a picture. They all look about the same.

This is actually a clock. A lot of them were more like sculptures with clocks on them. 

Big clock

The garden

Ceiling of a pavilion in the garden. The picture didn't turn out awesome, but I thought it was cool that there was a dragon coming out of it.

This hill is man-made. I thought it was pretty cool.

This is one of a set of elephants. They're supposed to be pretty famous.

Outside the walls, this is pretty cool. Nancy liked the frozen boat.

After the Forbidden City we made a hop, skip and jump over to Beihai Park, one of Beijing's larger downtown parks. It was a pretty cool place with a pretty (frozen) lake and a nice hill to climb to get a good view of the city. Here are some pictures we took there.

This is  a cool building. You had to pay extra to go inside so we didn't bother. It was cool from a distance, though.

A random lady offered to take this picture for us. She said we looked good in front of the pretty view.

After that we headed to a different neighborhood because our plans for the evening would be over there. We had a little trouble finding a restaurant, but we did see this building:

I don't know what this building is, but I know it's famous. Turns out it's the headquarter for CCTV. There you go.

We eventually found a restaurant, which turned out to be crazy spicy, but then we went to the evening's real event: a Chinese Acrobatic show! It was AWESOME! Seriously, so cool. They did some really crazy crap. This video shows some of the stuff they saw. Probably the highlights of the show were when they got 11 girls balanced on one bike (I felt sorry for the poor girl who had to pedal) and the the finale blew my mind! They had one of those motorcycle sphere cages and they put one guy in, and then two, and then three, and then four, and then five, and they were shooting around in there like crazy, and I turned to Nancy and said, "Okay, I'm pretty sure they aren't going to put any more in." And then THREE MORE GUYS ON MOTORCYCLES CAME OUT! They put eight guys on motorcycles in one cage! So crazy! It was awesome. We took a couple pictures, just to prove we were there, though I'm pretty sure we weren't supposed to.

Anyway, the show was awesome. That's about all I've got to say for this day, though. I'm going to call it good. This is Captain Danger out.