TOURING BEIJING

It was our first offical day in Beijing and I was anxious to meet the other 16 people in my tour group. If you look carefully at this picture you will see that many of these people are of Indian heritage. The older people immigrated from India over 40 years ago to work in Flint, Michigan. Their children, grandchildren and their friends in the picture all live in Las Vegas. The other couple is from Austin, Texas. When you travel you get to know many interesting people!!
We boarded our bus early in the morning to explore this city and the countryside. Beijing(also called Peking) is the capital of China and one of the 4 Great Ancient Capitals of China. They estimate that 22 million people live in and around it!!! For thousands of years different Emperors have ruled this area and built many amazing palaces, temples and parks. We first rode to Tian'an men Square, which used to be the main entrance to the imperial palace, but in modern days massive monuments and halls have been built to honor New China.

It was raining pretty heavily so we didn't spend much time there but instead hurried through the high walls into the Forbidden City. It is the largest palatial complex in the world with 980 buildings and the emperors lived there from 1368-1911. The wooden buildings are all red with intricate paintings on them in gold, blue, green and black. The roofs are sloping yellow(color of emperors)tiles with different bird and animal statues on them. They all have special meanings because the Chinese are very superstitious. We walked through the large ceremonial courtyard and up the ramp to see the Hall of Supreme Harmony(98 feet tall)

where the emperors held court-there was an enormous pillar with a dragon wound around it. I think this was to scare people! He also had 2 other halls with thrones in them for all his ceremonies.
Then we went into the Inner Court, which is where the emperor and his family lived and into their lovely garden. It certainly was an enormous place for one family to live in!!
The Forbidden City is now a huge museum filled with 50,000 paintings, 340,000 pieces of ceramics and porcelain, 10,000 bronze pieces, 30,000 jade pieces and over 1,000 mechanical timepieces(they invented clocks)--unfortunately I only had time to see a few.

Then we rushed through the rain to get into rickshaw carriages that took us to lunch in the Hutong(ancient) part of the city where we had a homemade Chinese lunch.

After lunch we went to the Beijing Zoo to see the Giant Pandas. Too bad they were having their afternoon naps!

I was ready for a nap too because there is a 13 hour time difference between Chicago and China, which means that at 3 in the afternoon there it was 4 in the morning in Chicago--yawn.....

PS-I'm including a picture of our dinner table because this is the way many Chinese restaurants serve large groups of people. Most of our meals were served like this, on a rotating glass plate, and generally included 10-14 dishes! They served watermelon for desert, so when it came out we knew that the meal was finally over!