We took sooo many photos at the Forbidden City.
First stop of the day was Tiannanmen Square. Uhm… it’s a big square. Booooring. We walked out from the underpass, took a look at it, walked 1/4 of the way across it and then decided there was no point in seeing the whole thing. There’s nothing to see!
We decided The Forbidden City was probably a lot more interesting and went there instead. There’s a couple of gates you have to pass through to get inside the City. It was kind of confusing. We just kept walking and walking and then finally we spotted a ticket line.
The Forbidden City is huuuuuge. You recognize the main sections from the movies, but it’s like 10x bigger than I imagined.
Us: Uhmmmm this place is kinda big…
Good thing Judy bought a map! (Judy always has a map.)
The details on the buildings are beautiful.
Obviously they re-do the paint every so often.
It was so cool to see one of these stairways in person.
It was really crowded!
People in China don’t stand in line… this is the rugby scrum/mosh pit to see the main throne room. Aimee and I nearly got trampled trying to get up to the front. Judy says some tiny old lady tried to shove her out of the way. Obviously that didn’t work so well. LOL
Hm… note sure this was worth nearly getting trampled to see. =D
It was really cool to see the throne room though. It looked like one of the few places they decided to leave in its original state.
More cool rooftops.
We all took a lot of photos of the same things, and there is a retarded number of photos of us taking photos of each other taking photos. LOL
The traditional Fu dogs guarding the door. There is usually a female and a male dog and you can tell which one is the female by looking for the puppy. (I did not know that until someone told me that day!)
Most awesomest husband evar. LOL. Marcus carted around all our stuff and held umbrellas and was a great sport about me, Judy and Aimee dragging him around to things we wanted to see.
We decided to head down the right side of The Forbidden City. The place is so big, we never made it to the left side.
This section had a paid ticket entrance so you could see the Nine Dragon Wall. We found that the paid sections of the sites we went to were far less crowded and totally worth the couple bucks it took to get in.
I was really excited to finally see one of these walls in person!
All the roof corners have these little statues on them. They vary and I’m not sure of the significance butcalls them dragon babies so that’s what we were calling them.
Me taking a photo of Aimee taking a photo…
Aimee was taking a photo of the dragon drainage spout. Most artistic drainage system ever.
We stopped by one of the museum exhibits displaying jewelry from the Qing Dynasty. Most of these artifacts we saw while in Beijing were relatively young. By young, I mean they only went back about 5 dynasties. I found that a little odd but we didn’t go to the really big museum in Beijing so maybe they had more stuff there. (Turns out I saw a lot of the really old artifacts in Taiwan’s museum – which is where a lot of the stuff ended up after WWII and the civil war.)
Braiiiiiiins. Uh, I think it’s carved coral actually. =D
Thanks Marcus. >.<
The 12 zodiac signs in humanoid form.
