Beijing Day 2

Hello from cold Beijing! We started the day after eating some breakfast by bundling up in a bunch of layers, hat, gloves, and headed out to find the forbidden city. It was a longer walk than we expected, but we found it! We decided to go to Tiannamen square and look around. There was a huge line of people going into this building, and we figured that was where people could view Mao. We found where people were going in and started walking toward the line. A man let Joel and I through, but stopped David, saying something in Chinese, and pulling on his backpack. Then he proceeded to literally pull David across the street to a building. At first I was a little freaked out that we wouldn’t see him again, but then I saw that the building was marked bag check. David was not allowed to go into the building to see Mao with his backpack. Then we got in line which was about 15 minutes long, basically a huge herd of people going towards a security check area. When we got to the security area, they wouldn’t let us in because we had our cameras and apparently there are no cameras allowed. So David took the cameras and Joel and I went in to see Mao who was preserved in a glass tomb thing, with a statue of him, and most of the people were bringing flowers in and putting them in front of the statue. Definitely an interesting experience. I am pretty sure we were the only white people in the whole place.

After that we toured the Forbidden City. Joel’s favorite thing here were the cauldrons that they used to use for storing water for fighting fires. It was pretty cold, so we also enjoyed going to the inside museum displays.

We were super tired after all that walking so decided to take the Subway back to the hotel. Apparently everyone in all of Beijing had the same idea. When the subway came, it was already full but we pushed our way in. The door almost closed before David could push his way (literally) into the subway. The subway was so crammed full that Joel’s face was pressed up to David. The next stop no one got off but a bunch of people got on, even though I thought there was no way another single person could ever fit. I’ve been in packed subways before but this was crazy.

We went back to the hotel and took a nap and then got up to go for a swim in the freezing pool, but it was still nice to swim a little. Then we went to the yummiest restaurant. David was so excited to find a hot pot thing (not sure what it is called, but it has rice and beef and some veggies, and the pot is super hot so that the rice gets all crispy – yum). Joel was too tired to enjoy being adventurous for this meal, but David and I were excited to have some real Chinese food.

Tomorrow we are going to try to get to the Great wall on our own. We plan on taking a bus, so pray that we make it to the right bus and make it back too! If we still have any energy left tomorrow night, we will try to go to the acrobatics show.

FYI, we are having some computer problems so communication might be intermittent. We will do our best to at least post the big news as it comes in.