Beijing Day 4

Zach and I (after lazing about the hotel all morning) decided to head to the Forbidden City again for a second try. But first, before doing anything else, we ran down to the train station to get trian tickets for the return journey. Luckily, we happend to get behind this girl and her mother, and the girl was an American Journalist who had been in China for two years and spoke fluent Chinese! She was extremely nice and helped us get our train tickets. Unfortunately, she and her mother were unable to get tickets because the train they wanted was full. I wish we could get together with her, but I didn't have my phone and she hasn't emailed us.

Once back, we made a quick stop at Gate Tower, which had a wonderful little museum about the Beijing Wall and Five Archways street. As for our trip to The Forbidden City, this time we decided to visit a few more of the museums. It is truly awe-inspiring to be in rooms with thins that are that old. We visited The Museum of Precious China, which held truly beautiful craftsmanship, saw museums dedicated to the guards, the emperors, the concubines, and many others. Unfortunately we didn't get to see the Hall of the Clocks because they were closing the city. Once again, we didn't have enough time to get through what we wanted to at the Forbidden City. We still need to see the Imperial Gardens.

We did have our first run-in with the Chinese Police (and Paul thought he would be the first, ha). There were a few policemen fooling around with their hats off and having fun, so Zach and I tried to sneak some pictures. Well the guards noticed, and so they sent an english-speaking policeman to come find us and erase the pictures of the guards from our cameras. Boo.

On our way out, apparently the security guards decided to exhert their control again by not letting us exit through the front gate. Instead, we got rerouted a half-hour out of our way around the outer walls of the Forbidden City and putting us on Wangfujing Dajie (the place where the Pizza Hut is). On the way, we stumbled across thre awesome things: 1) a little shop that sells cheap, pirated DVDs that look real (I bought 2), 2) Subway, where we stopped for dinner, and 3) the barbeque street where you can get odd things to eat like Starfish, centipede, scorpion, dog, and just about anything else. It was pretty exciting. We've now deemed Wangfujing Dajie "Western Street" because it's where you find all of the Western stores; Armani, Cartier's, Pizza Hut, Haagen Daas, Outback Steakhouse... We almost ate Starfish, but I was too full to eat anything and Zach was repulsed by the smell. Maybe next time... We decided to head home and watch some of our new movies.

Later that night, we had a craving for McDonalds, so we decided to head over. We were on our way out the door to the hotel when we noticed two women arguing with the girl at the front desk. The older one turned to us and asked us if we spoke English and asked if we could help hem. It turned out that they had just arrived from Guilin and their key wasn't working. They got the misunderstanding cleared up soon after we stopped to help, but these poor women were having the trip from hell! I don't remember everything, but what I do remember is that they were supposed to fly from Guilin to Xi'an, but their flight was inexplicably cancelled. So they wound up taking the 27 hour train ride from Guilin to Beijing hard-seat, standing room only. They sat in the dining car the whole time, but had to pay 30-50 qui every few hours to stay in there. No wonder they were frantic! We were supposed to go with them to the Summer Palace the next day, but on the way to the bank, the mother tripped and fell and hurt her hip! They wound up taking a rickshaw tour of the hutongs. Poor women!