Benny and I spent a total of 3 days in Bejing. The first day was just the evening, since we had flown in from Shanghai and spent most of the rest of the time trying to find our hotel, It would have been easy to hire a taxi, but the drivers charged more at night — out stop was only a few km away but they would have charged us 5 times the usual amount because they knew that people needed taxis more at night when trying to find a hotel.
The next day we spent exploring several capital buildings within the inner section of the city. At its imperial height, Bejing had 18 wall rings surrounding it, with the palace (and the Emporor) in the very center. Several palaces and guard towers in the middle were in a straight line (north to south as I recall) with the Arrow tower in the very front. Together they formed the “Dragon’s head”. This tower was open for tourists, so we checked it out. Relics dating up to 2000 years prior to the formation of the US were quite common. On this trip we also saw the origin point of china; every geographical measurement in the country is based around this point.
After passing through this anchient fortress, we found ourselves in Tienammen square. It was quite the tourist attraction and photo opportunity zone. Nearby were The Chinese Congress building and National History Museum. Some people wanted to take pictures with me, since I was e a very excotic foreigner. This included a group of three girls on a trip; noeach of them has a photo with me on their equivalent of a facebook page. Looking back on this, my less rational side insists that I at least have tried to get their phone numbers, while more more reational side remembers that I did not know how to ask them. Both sides agree that I should learn more Chinese to avoid mistakes like this in the future.
We eventually made our way to the forbidden palace, which itself chronicled hundreds of years that Bejing was the national capital. So much gold, pearl, and Jade were there that Benny and I eventually got tired of seeing any of these precious metals.The depth of history here dawned on me when one garden was listed as having been established in 1776, the same year that a bunch of men in the colony of Virginia started to get some ideas about a new system of government. We had to go back for a second day to finish the Forbidden city tour since, even after 6 hrs of sightseeing, we only made it trough 3/4 of the reccomended tour as given by the tour maps.
On the way to the forbidden city, we were greeted by a Chinese artist. He gave aneloquent story about how he wanted the opinions of westerners and their preferences in terms of Chinese art. After showing me a large selectin of works done by both himself and students in his art school, he started to try seslling them to me. I had seen by fair share of hard sellers in China so far, but thihs was the most elaboratet sales pitch so far.