Next stop Ulan Bator

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.