Forbidden City

I got a little behind on my blog but here's the update. On September 4th we visited the Forbidden City. It's hard to explain the scale of this especially since we only saw a small percentage of it in about 3 hours. There's way too much to possibly see but I basically walked in a straight line from the entrance to Tiananmen Square. There was an exhibit with the Emperor's clothing that was really cool and we did some group photos in front of Mao's mausoleum that attracted alot of attention.

I think the most interesting part of the day was wandering through Beijing afterward. A small group of us went into a restaurant and ordered by pointing at the pictures. We got something really strange that we know we hadn't ordered so we sent it back for something else really strange. Since the menu was all in Chinese we had no idea what we were eating but we took pictures of the characters to have it translated. Ying later told us that the first dish was duck tongue and the dish that we replaced it with was duck heart. Yum!

Later we all met up at a Tea house to drink tea and watch some performances. It was a great experience. There was traditional Chinese opera, a couple of guys doing vocal sound effects, a painted face character that could switch faces in a split second and I still have no idea how, and some sweet kung-fu that completed the long day.