A Day At The Forbidden City

The forbidden city, one of the most famous attractions in Beijing. We were four of the over 14 million annual visitors. We admired the exquisite detail and color of the temples and enjoyed the rare blue skies. We also paid a short visit to the treasure museum that show cased the beautiful treasures that aged nicely over the centuries. We all agreed that such touristy, crowded areas were exhausting and retired early back to our hotel room.
The next day was a resting day, despite the gorgeous weather. We studied, read, napped and researched the rest of our trip. We had recently purchased some classic literature at a foreign language bookstore and Justin and Nicholas jumped into “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.” For lunch we went to a great local restaurant down the street serving the Beijing speciality, Peking Duck. Yum. We had filling dishes of the classic duck and pancake with scallions and cucumber, meatballs that were the size and texture of munchkin donuts and pulled it off, candied sweet potatoes and more. We ordered a jujube soup, which turned out to be sweet and slimy. Picture sweet water, perhaps sweated with honey, partly frozen so it was like a slushee. Now imagine that it some how defies logic and is hot. There are saccharine hunks of fruit suspended in the warm slush as well, with two maroon dried jujubes on top. It was definitely a new branch on soup.
This morning we had another lazy day, before going out around noon. We walked along a nice little river. (A nice walkway around a river I wouldn’t recommend swimming in that is) However, many middle aged guys we’re taking turns diving into the murky depths. One man was out in the middle of the channel with a floaty.
We paid a very small entry fee to get into a splendid park around a lake. The island of greenery in a concrete ocean was full of families taking advantage of the ropes course, paddle boats, croquet quarts, kiddie rides, basketball hoops and gardens. A large stone courtyard with coat hangers that could function as goals encouraged Nick and I to start a game of pick up soccer with some local boys. We had a lot of fun and it’s always nice to hangout with some new friends. Tomorrow we will be getting up at 5 am in order to visit the Great Wall of China before the crowds.