I was one
of the first people out in Forbidden City even before it opened. And it was
cold, I bought a jacket and lost it three days later again leaving it at the
coffee bar close to the office. Everybody else had winter jackets on. But there
is a nice warm place in the Museum where you can even have good coffee. It is
really cool, they have maps which you can rent, they have gps on and they guide
you through Forbidden City. And the guide talks about what is interesting but
you are free to choose where you want to go and it only tells you the story
once and marks it green after you were there. It has GPS in there. I love
technology. Probably next year they will have a wireless station where you can
download the app so you don’t even need a special device anymore.
It is
funny. Whenever travelling alone, there a good chance you meet people. While
strolling through some random Hutong close to the “Forbidden City”, I didn’t even react anymore when somebody
called after me. Obviously, on tourist places they are always trying to sell
something at tourist spots. Especially in the morning at 8:30, there are not so
many victims around. But this time it
was different, the person wanted to get my attention, because he wanted to let
me know that my shoe needs some maintenance. As it needs every time I am
running in the forest as well as this week on the treadmill every morning. So
now I can start paying attention to people again in this area, since they don’t
only try to sell caps with red stars and handbags with Mao on it anymore. Here
is my favourite person one looking out of a café with his breakfast in his
hands.
Then again I met somebody on the street. And
now I have friend from Mongolia. We ended up going to a tea house chatting for
more than an hour. Now I know what milk wine is, horse milk mixed with some
liquor. It seems that it sells pretty well in Russia and China, since that was
his job, making business with big hotels and other distributors. When I get
home tomorrow, I can glance with new knowledge about Mongolian horses now.
Seriously, as the tea ceremony did last Sunday, that made my day. You can see
spectacular things, as I did that day, but it was even more fun talking and walking
with Baisa over the Tian’anmen square. We exchanged email addresses and
promised each other we will meet next time when we visit each others country.
School class in the garden of the temple of heaven |
In the afternoon I visited the temple of heaven. The park is next to a market so I was
able to get some great stuff for my kids, hopefully with that, the pictures and
all the sweets I just bought at the airport, they hopefully don’t think anymore
that everything is poisoned in China. This was a great journey and I leave the “Great
Firewall” behind me and fly back home.