Beijing The Forbidden City

8 am After an amazing Asian and Western breakfast we are off. Today we see the forbidden city and the temple of heaven.
11 am Resting a moment. My goodness how many people how much noise how huge. Tienanmen square boggles the mind it's so huge. There was a queue of local people waiting to see Mao Zedong mausoleum that was so long you couldn't see either end.
We went inside the forbidden city. Gigantic but not as opulent as Bangkok's. There are so many people, I hear 100.000 which is the maximum that will be allowed. You have to fight to move, to take pictures, to breathe, selfie sticks everywhere.

After walking and walking we walked all the way up to the hill and went to the Temple of heaven in the Palace Museum. The park around it is incredibly beautiful, I may even say poetic. Very peaceful woods with any kind of trees and shrubs.
The activity park was something special with brand new excercise machines full of people excercising or doing Tai Chi, or a Beijing martial art with a fan that was just beautiful to see

After this, we left our guide and decided to venture with the Beijing subway. It's quite easy to travel in subway and a ticket costs 3 RMB.

After we went to the Antiques market, but I found it quite trashy. Very large and the closed shops had some nice furniture. We got an iron cast teapot for Oleg but turning the corner we found an entire shop of just teapots all nicer and cheaper.. Oh well.
After we went to the Beijing Silk market. It was quite large nearly as large as the old Shanghai take market. We bought a wind breaker abed a black down jacket for Oleg, then one fur me, a long white goose down coat for me for 60 Euros and a lovely parka for Robbie.
After this we decided to eat onsite, at the top floor there was did court and we went to a nice Beijing restaurant at Chaoyang. The service was extremely slow but we had some nice noodles and walked home. We were supposed to walk for about 40 minutes but Rob insisted we make a turn and take a "shortcut" which took us in some really grotty areas, in front of the Beijing station (shambles is not the word...), walked in some quite hair-raising winding Ashley's behind with people starting at the 3 crazies venturing there, and finally at 11.30 pm we lumped into our hotel, quick shower and a snore.. To be woken at 3 am by the hotel alarm.Read more