The forbidden city

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In all his glory: Chairman Moa's world famous portrait at the entrance to the Forbidden City

We finally made it to the Forbidden City this weekend. Yeah! About time I think. Pete, Rachel, Brendon and Frikkie trekked to Tiananmen East subway station relatively early on Saturday morning. The plan was to avoid the masses, but I guess for something as popular as the Forbidden City that's kind of impossible. It was just us and bus loads of other tourists, most of them Chinese.

We got ourselves a great tour guide just outside the ticket office. I can really recommend Johnson (yz2974@yahoo.com.cn) - his English is great and is rate of RMB150 for a two hour tour was worth every cent and we're probably going to contact him again when we're ready to go to the Great Wall.
I knew the Forbidden City was big, but I don't think I was quite prepared for exactly how enormous it is. We walked, and walked and spent about 5 hours there. And we didn't get to see everything. Once we did the tour with Johnson we doubled back to the western section of the city where they keep all the palace treasures. The amount of gold and precious objects is staggering. I have seldom seen so many beautiful and rare things in one exhibition. We ended our visit with the Clock and Watch exhibition. Wow - a staggering amount of antique clocks and watched unlike anything I've ever seen and worth the RMB10 entrance fee. We staggered out of there suffering from visual overload, but in a good way.

On Saturday night the Aussies came round for dinner - yes, our first dinner party. We had to use paper plates, cause we only have 2 plates, but nobody seemed to mind to much cause Frikkie made a killer green curry.

On Sunday we headed off to one of the antique shopping streets. It was a little disappointing cause it's all been renovated. Which means that it's all neat and tidy and nothing like the antique market in Shanghai, which is still a real market and a little more 'organic'. But we got to see a little more of the southern part of the city, which is definitely less affluent and less developed and we had a glimpse of what real Hutong living is like, communal toilets and all.

It's a bit of a trek to the South since we're in the North and as a reward we popped in to the Vineyard, a cafe similar to Salvation Cafe in 44 Stanley. The food was yum and I'm pretty sure we'll be spending quite a few weekend mornings there digging into their famous veggie brunch.