imperial_garden

imperial_garden
Originally uploaded by Wasting Moments.

Spent the vast majority of today inside the Forbidden City. Roger Moore narrates the english language version of the audio tour. Pretty funny. Took over a hundred pictures while there, of varying quality. I really like this one of part of the Imperial Garden. The archecticture and history of the Imperial Palace is all pretty incredible.

Everything is taking considerably longer than I originally anticipated, so I'm expecting to have to scale back my original, exceedingly ambitious Beijing itinerary. I did get back to Tiananmen Square during the day today, and did some walking around in general. I'd been hoping to get up to the Summer Palace as well, but that just didn't happen. Possibly because I spent the morning relaxing, watching football and posting pictures.

I'm planning to get up ridiculously early tomorrow, take the bus to the subway, the subway to a location where big tour busses run off to the Great Wall and the 13 Tombs every half hour all morning. My book indicates that I should allow 9 hours for the trip. I'm hoping to get there for the 2nd or 3rd bus (they start at 6:30), so there may be a chance that I have time to see something else later in the afternoon.

I spoke to some students from Beijing University today, and found out that the National Day holiday is a week long for many people. This explains why everything is so packed. I won't be able to go through Mao's Mausoleum; I looked today and the line was at least 2 hours long.

I'm thinking I may try to head out to the Summer Palace by cab Wednesday morning. That should give me a few hours out there, since my flight to Xi-an doesn't leave 'til 2:30.

I managed to find the Beijing Duck place I was looking for this evening. Wow, was that good. It didn't occur to me until just now, but I should be taking pictures of food, too. The roast duck is just amazing. They coat it in molasses, pump it with air, fill it with boiling water, and dry it out before roasting it. First they give you a plate of skin and meat, served with shallots, a plum sause and thin pancake things. Then comes a soup made of the bones and innards. Both stages are delicious.

I've made the pictures a bit smaller so that I can post more of them. I can only post 10 mb a month, and I'm already through almost 1/4 of those. I altered my script so it generates thumbnails at 450 pixels width rather than 600, which should help.

I'm also not going to blog every picture I post. For those of you who want more picures, you can get a stream of them off of flickr directly:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/china/
These are all the photos tagged china, so mine are interspersed with a couple other people's. I think you can get a stream of just mine by clicking the "Wasting Moments" link under any of my pictures. For those of you who are syndication fans, flickr provides both rss and atom feeds of images by user or by tag. You can subscribe to mine, and not even bother reading my blog. Although, if you want to do both, the blog also has an atom feed.

It's only 9:30, but I'm going to sleep pretty soon so I can get an early start on this Great Wall trip tomorrow. I'm not going to pony up for another day on the hotel network here, but there's a net cafe near where the bus should be spitting me out at the end of the trip tomorrow. I may post some thoughts, but may not get to post the next round of pics for another day or two though.