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Another early morning to make the bus to the tour.
Our tour guide picked us up from the hotel lobby, and walked us to another bigger hotel, with other tourists and the bus.
Our tourguide spoke very good english, and was very knowledgable about all of the sites, and Chinese history in general.
Our first stop was the Forbidden City ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_City ). It is the old imperial palace and administrative capital of the Chinese empire. It was started in 1406 and was considered finished in 1420. It was so called the Forbidden City, because the common folk were forbidden from entering, and the royal family concubines (of which there were many) were forbidden from leaving. This was the colloquial name, it was referred to as the Imperial Palace. We saw the various courtyards and throne rooms.
the courtyards were barren because the emperors were afraid trees or flowers would afford assassins cover.
The throne room was where the emperor recieved offical guests, and administered over the various religious functions.
The building behind that is where the actual meetings with the foreign representatives and high level imperial officials. This is where the actual running of the empire took place.
Behind this are various chambers with various functions.
We then saw the actual residences of the emperor.
he had multiple entrances, the official front door, and two side doors, from which his concubines would enter, it was unclear whether he had to choose one or the other, or if the doors were a matter of convinience.
We then went to the womens area of the Palace grounds, which was behind an extra wall, as no one but the ladies and of course the emperor was allowed back there. Well, the eunuchs were allowed back there too. This area of the palace was rather large and entirely managed by the Empress.
I neglected to mention that it was freezing, literally freezing. it was unusually cold for this time of year, hovering around 20F, and then wind chill making it bone chilling. So we kinda hurried through everything, i snapped pictures, and we moved along.
(apologies the pictures might not be in order, i am uploading this late because China doesnt like google stuff, so i am throwing this up later, enjoy the pictures)
Hopping back on to the bus, we got a feel for the other people on the tour; there was a mother/daughter duo from the interior of China, a husband and wife from Korea, a quartet of 20-something girls from the Phillipines, a husband and wife with two daughters from the San Francisco area (henceforth the Bay Area) and a husband wife with a 19 yr old, 17 yr old daughter, an adopted 9 yr old chinese daughter, and a 13 yr old son.
I will comment on them after i run through the historical shit we saw.
The bus took us to a Tea house, as one of their sales pitches. We were presented with a “tea ceremony” it was really a mildly educational sales pitch. The attendant made 5 different teas for us to try, and extolled the virtues of each “this one helps with liver and eyes, and this one makes you sleepy” etc
She then released us into the shop. The one tea i was impressed with was the Black tea, which is very much like whiskey, it is aged, has a taste that needs getting used to, and gets real expensive real quick. It tastes a little smokey, and very earthy, it usually comes in these big pucks that you break pieces off of. They had 8 inch x 1 inch disks of this stuff ranging in price from 300CNY to 36,000CNY, thats a $5000 dollar brick of tea leaves…
Piled back on the bus to get to the Temple of Heaven. Again given the cold we didnt stick around long. The temple of heaven (wikilink here) is in the middle of a very large park, which we wandered around a little bit, it costs money to enter the park, and actually requires another ticket to get onto the temple grounds, given the cold we neglected to do this.
The temple was built originally by the same guy that commissioned the Forbidden City, Yongle Emperor doin work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Heaven
The tour had arranged for golf cart-vans to take us through the park some and bring us to the lunch site. It was a restaurant in the park, and they served us another very generic, mundane chinese meal, again things obviously akin to what we can find in the US.
The carts then took us back to the bus, which took us to the second sales piitch of the trip; The Pearl Market.
This was pitched as being relevant, because the Dragon Lady (a certain queen i have yet to find the wiki page for) loved pearls, and it was she that did all the rehab on the forbidden palace and the Summer Palace.
It was a terrible sales pitch, the sales lady walked in and asked people if they were families and if they were students. We think this was to determine how much they could sell us. Laura admitted we were not students…
She told us a little about freshwater pearls vs ocean pearls, how to spot fake pearls, and then very abruptly stopped, and took us out to the sales floor. I think she may have been frustrated by the Bay Area family’s many questions (ill get to this). At the floor she told us of the deals and specials they were running, and handed us off to the actual sales people.
Laura and i very disinterestedly wandered around until we ran into our guide who said the bus was open. We immediately left for the bus, to sit in the back, and talk shit about the other Americans on the trip (this is coming up, just wait)
The last bus ride was a little longer, as the summer palace was on the outskirts of the city. Originally it was a little ways away from the city, so the royals could escape the city, but close enough that they could return within the day, and administrators could come and go with relative ease.
The summer palace was beautiful ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Palace ), and actually is a preview of our coming time in Suzhou and Hangzhou. Apparently one of the emperors was so enthralled with the Westlake in Hangzhou that he had his architects emulate it when digging up the lake in the Summer Palace grounds. He was also enamored with a certian bridge in Suzhou, so he had his architects emulate it here as well.
We were unable to enter the actual administrative portions of the palace grounds, it was mostly a big park, with example royal residences from the 1860s.
this was about the time i started asking my own questions of the tour guide, trying to figure the timeline that this Dragon Lady was leading through, and she kept making reference to the “eight nations” which i later determined was all the gunboat diplomacy the french and british and russians and germans and americans were exercising in China at the time. By now it was warming up and we enjoyed ourselves a little more, however, this was essentially the end of the tour.
we piled back on the bus, and were taken back to our respective hotels.
The dinner we got was forgettable, we were looking for the DanDan noodles i had fallen in love with in Tokyo, and found them. Unfortunately the mall food courts here, arent as universally awesome as they are in Japan. The food was not very good, while wandering the mall we found another food court, that had examples of cuisine from all over China. We think this would have beem the place to taste a bunch of different stuff. Our mistake.
We then made our way home, and got to sleep early, making up for all the lost sleep with travel and early tours.
Those of you unwiilling to read my disparaging fellow americans should log off now…
Ho-lee shit these people on this tour is why people hate american tourists, these are Ugly Americans.
First experience with the Bay Area family, listening to the father quiz the daughter on vocabulary words. This family was Indian American, pretty clearly second gen, thuroughly americanized. I have been on vacation as an elementary student, i have done homework on vacation, but never forced, and certainly not in a manner as obstructive to those around me as a verbal quiz on vocab words. Listening to the girls responses, it was pretty clear she didnt actually have a grasp on these words, she would regurgitate an answer, that was certainly right, but it was pretty clear she didnt actually appreciate how the word was used and what it meant. Also, as she checked out the father continued to throw words at her, and remind her she had to learn these words by next year (as in next calendar year? or next school year?). It didnt seem as though these words were actually generated by a school, we got the idea that this was the parents trying to “give her an advantage” in school.
The other portion of their childrens learning upset me. The father asked a number of questions, many of which were unnecessary as the answer was given in context moments before. We got the feeling that he wasnt asking for his own benefit, but for that of his daughters, which again, is cool. but if you actually valued the knowledge, you would have been paying attention in the first place. I got the feeling that they were accumulating knowledge, or rather, forcibly pouring knowledge on their kids for the sake of knowing more, rather than understanding more.
But the real thing that got both laura and i, was their dietary choices. They are in China, they flew from the Bay Area to Beijing, China, only 3 days prior, and had already eaten at Subway, McDonalds, and hit Starbucks a number of times. They expressed excitement at going to Subway that evening. They neglected to eat just about everything on the very americanized chinese lunch.
Stay home, use google maps to visit the sites, thats all you want anyways, no one wants you here, and it seems like you dont really want to be here either. you make us (all Americans) look bad.
The big family was worse. They were from Atlanta area. And our first taste of them was discussing whether they would have Pizza Hut or McDonalds for dinner that night. It only got worse from there.
The 13 yr old son threw a tantrum at one point on the bus because his mother didnt buy him a souviner panda hat (that nearly all the gypsy ladies sell here). the 17 and 19 yr old daughters got into a pissing match about how smart they are, using reading level in 5th grade as the metric. the mother and father actively called their other kid (an older kid not present) “the bad one”. they ate almost none of the food at lunch, with the father and son commenting on how “wierd” the food was (as the phillipino girls, the korean couple, and me/laura ate it). The younger son and adopted daughter were running around the temple and generally being unruly.
they were just an all around shitty group of people.
If we had had another stop on this tour, i probably would have laid into the kid…
It was embarrasing, not only was the family embarrsing itself, and me adn laura, but embarrasing on behalf of the entire United States. These people (Chinese) do not see many Americans, when you come over here, and refuse to eat the basic food, throw tantrums over bullshit, and disrespect their fucking history, you make us ALL look bad.
If you cant handle being outside your comfort zone, dont fucking leave it. Go to Chinatown in your city, fuckit go to Panda Express, you dont deserve “exotic” food, i dont want to run into you in Chinatown when im looking for good food.
/endrant
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