Part Two: Tiananmen Square/ Forbidden City

So after getting off the train we met our tour guide for the week, Robert (he's Chinese but a lot of Chinese people have English names also), from there we got onto our bus and went and checked into our hotel (that's another blog) and had breakfast. This was all to be done in an hour and then be back on the bus to go to this little cafe/ library where we are going to be having guest lectures all week. Lecturing us yesterday was one of our professors friends who is an American but has been living in Beijing for the last twenty years working as a journalist for United Press International (UPI). He was actually at Tinanmen Square in 1989 when the Chinese army rolled in (I'll explain below for those not familiar with this incident). He was giving us a talk on the last 600 years of Beijing history and the different phases its gone through. It was a really good talk, but it would of been a lot better if the only thing on everybody's mind hadn't been trying to stay awake.

So after we broke we went to lunch (pizza, first time while in China), and then thanks to the begging and pleading of our class our professors agreed to let us go back to the hotel to take an hour long nap (a bit of a tease, but much needed). Following the hour to nap/shower/whatever, we were back on the bus headed to Tiananmen Square.

Tiananmen Square is most famous for the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, a lot of you probably remember this, but for a while there had been protests happening at the square when the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) rolled in and turned their guns on their own people, kind of a big deal. So the square is directly in front of the Forbidden city where all of the emperors lived since the Ming Dynasty (a long time ago).

Extravagant is one word that immediately comes to mind when describing the Forbidden City, huge is the other. It is 72 hectales (not entirely sure what a hectale is), something like 900m by 600+ m, with 8,004 rooms. You get in there and you just keep walking through these huge doors and it keeps leading to more and more city, it looks like it's never going to end. Of course all of the rooms are painted with unbelievable detail, stone carvings, everything fit for an emperor.

Finally, after climbing this hill overlooking the whole city, we climbed on the bus and headed back, shower, dinner, bed. Headed to an art district today, supposed to be pretty cool, I'll let you know how it goes.

-AL