Day 4- Forbidden City

We spent our last day in Beijing on a walking tour through Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. We headed out from the hotel at around 9am and made our way to Tiananmen Square. The square is huge and located in the center of Beijing. It is the traditional site of festival and rallies and demonstrations. It can hold about 1million people at once. In the middle there is a Museum and the building that houses the dead body of the former Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. His body was embalmed when he died and is kept in a glass case in the Museum. It goes on display for about 3 hours a day, two days a week. Today just happened to be one of the days his body was on exhibition. We didn't see it but we saw the line of people waiting to go in to the museum. It was at least the length of a football field and about 4 people wide. Incredible!

We walked through the Square and through the Palace Gate and into the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is a walled complex of buildings at the north end of Tiananmen Square that was the former site of the Imperial Palace (1421-1911). It is now called the Palace Museum. We walked around the Forbidden and saw the outside of the different Palace buildings. They too (like the Summer Palace) have very unique English names and each building served a very specific purpose. The sheer size of the Forbidden City was amazing. I can imagine that if the Emperor wanted to meet a friend for lunch on the opposite side of the city it would take almost an hour just to walk across the palace grounds..hehe. LIke the rest of Beijing, the Palace Museum too is being restored so some of the beauty was masked by scaffolding. The most shocking thing of the tour was that there was a Starbucks in the middle of the grounds! Yes...I'm not lying! We didn't believe Vivian (our tour guide) when she told us but I saw it with my own eyes. It's disgusting really, can't anything just be sacred and free of commercial chains? That being said, we did stop for a coffee. (i know i know..its just not right). In our defence coffee is really hard to come by in China.

After the Forbidden City we had a couple of hours free time so Logan and I went to the Temple of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven is one of the most beautiful and best known temples in Beijing. It's located in the southern part of Beijing in Tian Tian park. It is where the Emperors used to go to worship. The park was so inviting and made me want to grab a spot of grass and picnic. But we couldn't actually walk on the grass. After a long morning in the crazy heat we kind of sped through the park grounds and made our way back to the hotel.

Today I also went to Grocery Store Heaven! Yes, that's right! In an upscale mall close to the hotel there was a new grocery store that just went on forever. It was the closest thing to a Canadian grocery store that I have seen in Asia. It had goods and brands from Europe, Asia and North America. We stopped int here to pick up some things for the train ride to Xi'an. Yum!