Relic Protected, No Scratch

That morning we started with a nice, hot, venti Mochachino at our local Starbucks (cause, you know: A Starbucks a day, keeps the Chinglish away). After checking our email and confirming some flight information, we took a taxi to the Summer Palace. Although we arrived there in the afternoon, we still managed to see and do a lot of things. We strolled through the gardens and took beautiful pictures of the lake and the surrounding temples. Some of our diehard readers may already have noticed the updates in the photo section to the right, with the complete overview of all of our photos at Yvo’s Flickr account. We had our daily exercise while climbing the stairs to the big temple on the far right side of the complex, but the view up there was well worth the effort. After the palace and gardens closed for the evening, we hired a taxi to the Olympic park who made an interesting detour which costs us a whopping 9 Yuan extra (that’s 1 Euro in real money); we didn’t bother to make a fuss about it.

The subway ride from the Olympic park to Marcel’s home took longer than expected, so we where 45 minutes late. We had a tour of his apartment and thankfully used his washing machine to do some long overdue laundry. While our dirty socks and underwear were tumbling around, we Skyped with Bernd’s mum, dad and sister and after that with Yvo’s mum and dad. When all that was over, it was time for Peking Duck! We joined Marcel’s colleague Robbert at a restaurant where we, after a 45 minute wait, had some terrific Peking Duck, which was sliced in front of us. After dinner we went to an interesting little bar for a couple of drinks.

The next morning we took the subway to the most southern part of the Tiananmen Square. The first thing we saw when exiting the subway was the arrow temple. Short after, we made our way to the Mao Mausoleum (or Maosoleum, if you will), but we didn’t bother to go inside because it was crowded and we already had a fair amount of propaganda in Moscow. We made our way through the Tiananman gate, clearly recognizable by the large portrait of chairman Mao. After declining 20 tour guides, we bought our entrance tickets at the ticket office and proceeded to the entrance of the forbidden city. It’s hard to imagine the size of this ancient complex with all the palaces, gates and relics, which seem to go on and on and on. It took us more than 3 hours to reach the far side of this impressive city. Half way there we took a short break and enjoyed a cup of green mountain tea. While walking through one of the many corridors, we were advised “relic protected, no scratch”, whatever that means. We simply ignored it and continued our way.

Our next stop was the Olympic park with the famous Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. We bought an entrance ticket and managed to pass a useless but cute security check. In the Bird’s Nest we sat down to enjoy the stadium to relax and take a few photos. Sitting there only for a few minutes, we became (yet again) a magnet for Chinese tourists. After enriching 12 more family albums, we decided to make our way to the center of the stadium and check out the suits and other material of the opening show. When it became dark the Water Cube gave us a free light show and we went to Marcel’s apartment to pick up our clean clothes. We had a nice chat, drank some beers and returned to the hotel.