A few more photos from day 1 in Beijing, actually.
I went out to grab dinner with my new friends after dumping all my pictures onto my computer, so these were in a different folder, and now a different post.
Along the way, I found more durians! Huzzah!
Also this! How American!
Ok, day 2 for real.
Some houses were tapping into green energy.
There were a lot of these traditionally doors.
We found our way back to the Forbidden Palace.
However, being a weekend, it was rather crowded, so we decided to come back a different day. I decided to just tag along with them since I basically had no idea what else to do.
Variety!
We were supposed to go to some kind of temple, but it was quite difficult to find for us. Also, a lot of things looked vaguely like temples.
Pets? Food? Some kind of "medicine"? Who knows!
More turtles.
Eventually we found it. It seemed like the tourists were probably very frustrating for the people that actually regularly attend there, but they probably should just walk anyway instead of trying to drive through hundreds of people.
The ticket came with some kind of CD thing. And another ticket inside.
It was popular, but spacious, so not very crowded.
Some of the people were really getting into it.
Some were convinced having the bigger torch was the key to success.
Hehe, that guy's getting crushed.
Free money!
I like the turtle animals.
When I saw my chance, I spun this the other way. Probably cursed someone as a result.
And then we left.
Found a cool game of whatever this is on the way.
Still not convinced the building next to the train station wasn't something.
We stopped at a tea house or something to get a lite lunch, but ended up getting milkshakes instead.
Apparently they served the poop coffee there.
The bendy straw makes it elegant.
I somehow managed to make this shot while riding an escalator.
Stands were a common site outside of train stations.
They sold a lot of cantaloupe on a stick.
We were on our way to see another temple, but found the pearl market along the way.
People in carts would constantly drive by and slow down and try to give us rides while we tried to figure out how to get into the temple, past the giant walls.
We walked along the wall for quite a while, realizing we were probably supposed to followed the wall in the other direction from the start.
We did, eventually, find an entrance though.
Perhaps, not the main entrance, but one none the less.
Complete with advanced multi-tiered tickets.
And a place I will never go.
There was even a convenient blue line to lead you to the only thing we went to see.
Bird.
We actually decided to lounge around on the grass for a while instead of going right into the main temple area place. But we did eventually find our way in and took a bunch of photos. (Some were probably in restricted areas maybe.)
These kids were (understandably) very popular with the tourists.
Then we left.
We found some more stuff on the way out of the middle section, which we were probably supposed to have passed first had we entered through the main entrance.
And apparently if we had, the Abstinence Palace would have only been the Fasting Palace.
We waited in line for some kind of acoustic room thing.
It didn't really work.
It's times when I see things like this that I think I ought to start my own religion.
The sign told me about some giant dragon pearl thing or something,
so I decided to wait in line;
the slow, slow line with everyone shuffling slowly past, grabbing photos,
of nothing worth my time.
I hadn't even realized that the dragon thing was the thing on the ceiling I took a photo of because I take a photo of everything anyway.
We were so close to leaving, when we stumbled on another thing.
There was some kind of platform in the middle that presumably did something. Maybe more acoustic stuff.
Or whatever this sign says.
My favorite part was definitely the glazed tiles. They had such beautiful color to them in the various places we went. Here are two good colors in a row. Blue,
and this cool green furnace or whatever.
There were some yellow and orange ones and stuff in the earlier pictures as well.
We eventually did make our way to an exit.
Along the way, some guy with a water bottle or whatever he had it in, was spraying Chinese characters on the ground. He wrote something I could actually read out of coincidence.
UNESCOy.
And yet, somehow, the main entrance didn't seem all that main.
However, it is impressive how close it was to the train station we arrived at.
Then we wandered over to the Pearl Market we saw earlier.
ShabuShabu! Shame we didn't get to go. It's interesting to see how different languages transliterate the same thing differently. It could also be the case that the Japanese was transliterated into Chinese and then back into Roman.
You know you're in the right place.
It was basically a big tourist mall thing. Nothing too great, but a lot of the classical things like pearls and silk and whatever other stereotypes or historically significant things I wasn't aware of.
Then we got something like dim sum, but not nearly as fun.
Meanwhile I perfected chopstick technique.
(Though the noodles proved beyond our chopstick, spoon, and even fork techniques combined.)
Look at them in there, enjoying their ShabuShabu.
Textiles aplenty! Also a lot of overpriced cheap electronics.
Like I said, someone decided the abbreviation for Beijing should be BJ, so I naturally tried to buy some of the shirts as gifts. Fortunately, some people tried to tell us about the shirts. I detected their slight accent and asked if they were Germans. They then began to speak very fast German, but what I picked up was that they were way overpriced here and went for like a tenth of what they were being sold for. I tried to just get a picture and move on, but the lady said I had to buy it to take pictures (though I already had). Eager to try to haggle better than I did in Korea, I tried to haggle. I turned out to be terrible at it again, but my friends really helped out. In the end, I paid a little extra, but I went for 200 Mao bucks each to something like 37 each.
Yeah, and more pearls and whatever. In the end, I think I was the only one that actually got anything. And it wasn't anything fancy, just the shirts.
It lights up!
As did the whole building apparently. Rainbowful.
I'm easily amused.
On the way back, we found some guy selling some crazy kite-ness. My friend ended up buying one for a relative. They were offering different lengths as if anyone wouldn't just buy max length. That's like the point of it.
Surprisingly, the rainbow umbrella hats became mildly useful when it decided to rain. I lent them to my friends and I was tasked with guarding the backpacks (and thus cameras) under a poncho one of them gave me.
I had a surprisingly difficult time finding milk. This was the best I could do.
Apparently all things in China transform. I found this in the hostel.
Well, while my second attempt at visiting the Forbidden Palace was also a failure. I did see other stuff that I probably would have been too lazy to go to see, and I had people to walk around with, which made it a lot more fun, despite my initial intentions. Oh well, it had to be called "Forbidden" for a reason. Maybe it also transformed.
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