Beijing Trip: Forbidden City

I truly make an effort to be a culturally sensitive person.  I always try to be polite when dealing with things that are foreign to me, even when I dislike them. Daily instances: being shoved, being cut in line, having a huge loogey spit on the sidewalk right where you were about to walk. I try to make allowances.

I say this in the hope that you'll forgive me because I'm sure that what I'm about to say is very rude.

The source of my rudeness: Tomb Sweeping Holiday.  Catchy name, am I right?

The tradition is what really gets me though. You go and eat lunch, preferably picnic style, at [read:with] the graves of your ancestors. And then you clean them. You actually clean the tombs. That's the holiday.

Why this one thing sticks out to me as absurd when any number of not normal things have worked themselves into my new-normal routine is beyond my grasp right now, but I mention it because it brought us to Beijing. That's right, Tomb Sweeping Holiday is four day weekend. (I guess that's how long it takes to finish sweeping all the tombs?)

So I had a lot of firsts.

First time to take the train in China. 

Shiny

First time to show up at the wrong train station and have to run through the station to exchange/buy new tickets fifteen minutes before the train departed. If you are thinking, idiots, who shows up at the wrong train station? Didn't they check? I say to you: I always check! I just, this once, had a tiny, um, mishap brought about by the fact that I can't read Chinese characters.

First time in the super nice sleeping cars! [=mistake rewarded]

There were built in TVs at the foot of each bed. We had the top bunks.

First time to visit the Forbidden City.

For Luck

Reflections

It was both bigger and smaller than I had anticipated.

Bigger in the sense that everything was very spread out and thus occupied a vast amount of space as a whole. Smaller in the sense that it was less grand than I had pictured.

But it was still amazing.

This slight disappointment I own completely to the fact that I had been reading too much historical fiction about the Forbidden City in the height of it's glory in the months leading up to our visit (misplaced modifier-the reading was in the months before the visit, not the glory).

Ceramics

It would have been much cooler had it been full of emperors and concubines all shuffling about in their ostentatious silken outfits delicately plotting each others murders in the shadows of their immaculately kept rock gardens. I wanted to see the parade of a hundred dishes coming to the Empress' pavilion for her nightly dinner. I pictured it being like the "Be Our Guest" scene from Beauty and the Beast, only with the added benefit of being sinister and Chinese.

 

Tourists are considerably less interesting. Oh well, I have only myself to blame. Antiquity aside, it really was a lovely place to visit, and our geeky audioguides that we rented gave enough snipits of palace intrigue to keep me appeased.

These guys were everywhere. My audioguide probably told me about them, but I forgot.

We spent a few hours visiting all the palaces inside before heading across the street to visit Tienanmen Square.  Since Mao wasn't accepting visitors in the afternoon we just snapped a few pictures and left to go and meet our delightful hosts, the Jacksons and go out for a fabulous dinner of Peking Duck.

Our volunteer photographer insisted on crouching down on his knees to get the maximum possible up angle that the Chinese love for pictures and Americans hate because of the inevitable "fat face." After the overnight train ride and no small number of hours sightseeing around the city, we weren't in a frame of mind to care.

I'll save the Temple of Heaven and the Great Wall for next time.