Walk walk walk...

Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Beijing, Beijing, China
It's lovely to start the day with a breakfast comprised of foods you recognise. :D The buffet here is gorgeous, and if you felt up to it (or were used to it) you could choose to have dim sum too, which we absolutely didn't. :P My stomach needs breakfast in the morning, not dinner. I'm never right for the day if I start with lunch...

I was still totally jetlagged, so I went back to bed for a couple of hours . When I got up, we braved the holidaying throngs to head again to the Forbidden City, this time picking up some audio guides to make sense of the place. Unfortunately, a lot of the buildings were closed and the crowds were ENORMOUS. Just enormous. This National Day holiday ends on the 7th, which should ease all this congestion, but trying to do anything touristy until then is tough work. :P And the historical buildings in the Forbidden City aren't ever walk-through-able, but they usually have the doors open and a gate up so you can lean over and see in. Then Daddy's audioguide decided to quit, and I wasn't paying €4 for a dud, so I harassed a guy at a desk until he got some woman to come down with a replacement. They were pretty cool, actually, because they're GPS activated (though you only hear each item once), and the blinking light means "you are here" and the lights that aren't on mean "you've done this". We just missed the Chinese Robot Writing clock at 3pm, again. Bah humbug! But the FC is just soooooo huuuuuuge (and today, sooooooo busy) that it's really hard to keep at it without a break, so after walking around the halls, through the courtyards and looking at a couple of the side buildings, we had enough red walls, golden roofs and pickle-eating-grannies seen for one day, so we headed out. The pavilion at the back is a desperate gauntlet of hawkers, touts, "taxis" and "tour guides". Of course, as soon as I started the video on my camera, they all disappeared. :P

We took a walk down Donghuangcheng street, past some old men playing draughts on the path, and back to the hotel for another break . This hotel is the best job altogether. Not that Ma Ying's apartment wasn't comfortable - it was lovely - but the hotel is geared towards easing the laowei's stay in Beijing. And some little sprite comes in every evening and leaves me a bottle of water, turns down my bed, puts out my hotel slippers and puts a bed time story on my pillow. :D I love it. Why can't I get this kind of service at home?! Sheesh!

In the evening we had decided to go for the buffet in the hotel and had all sorts of lovely things (soup, cheese, seafood, sushi, vegetables, pizza, meat, rice and noodles) all washed down by some cute little dessertlets and Haagen Dazs ice cream. We're right beside Wangufijing street here too, so I decided that we were going on a walk there after dinner, to admire the type of food we hadn't eaten. Snake, worm, grub, liver stuff, starfish, seahorses or still-wiggling-scorpions. EW EW EW. Seriously. I shall show you all videos if you don't believe me. I've never felt sorry for a scorpion before, but I sure as hell did today. :(

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