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Posts tagged beijing
Day 2: Forbidden Palace (29/09/09)
Nov 6th
Was a bit slack over the pass few weeks, hence did not put this up as promptly as I should have. Enjoy it nevertheless.
We had breakfast at the hotel, they offered both Western and Eastern breakfast menus. I opted for the more traditional breakfast.
They had pretty much everything you expect in a breakfast and then some. They also had actual chefs to cook for you, if you wanted a Chinese pancake or maybe even a noodle dish.
After breakfast, we decided to catch a taxi to the Forbidden Palace. For a city of 18 million, you’d think taxis are common but most of the taxis were occupied. As soon as you see a taxi drop someone off, all of a sudden you have groups of people rushing towards it trying to hitch a ride. After 10 minutes of waiting and aimless flagging, we caught a break when a taxi dropped someone off 10 meters from us.
So like the Forbidden Palace is one of those places where people tell you it’s big…but you don’t realise how big it actually is when you step into it. Man, it’s bloody big. Everything is big and grandeur. We also hired a freelance tour guide, they seem to just stand around the ticket office asking if people needed a guide. It’s nice that you don’t have to find one, they just come to you, but it’s also rather annoying when everybody you meet is either trying to sell you something or offer you a service (there’s more on that later).
So began our journey throughout the palace. Most of what the tour guide said I didn’t actually understand but I did understand several stories. One being how all the concubines slept in this one “house” and every night the emperor would come and select 3 concubines to bed with. Ridiculous.
I also noticed that several freeloaders have jumped onto our ship. Towards the end we had around 6 random strangers following us listening to our tour guide.
Unfortunately, wordpress doesn’t allow you to insert more than one picture into a post when you click “insert media” so I’m just going to put up the entire gallery. If you want to read up on each picture just hover your mouse over the pic and read the alt text. Enjoy!
Edit: Turns out the alt text is the description, the file name is the alt text and the description is…well..nothing! BUG!
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- That’s a water well. Yup, in China our well’s are square bitches!
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- Even the paint is made out of gold!
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- Sun dial.
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- Emperor’s dinner. One row is for looking, one row for sniffing, not sure about the other rows but I’m sure one of them is for actually eating :P
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- The freeloaders with our tour guide.
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- Empress’s toilet. Notice the golden chamber pot?
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- Who’s your daddy?
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- Longest stone tablet in the city weighing over 20 tonnes. It’s all one piece of stone. They carved it in the summer and transported it during the winter. They did this by pouring water on the ground, waiting for it turn to ice and then dragging the tablet across it. Quite ingenious.
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- Emperor’s walkway.
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- Big door stop is big.
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- It’s a dragon turtle!
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- Forbidden palace taken ontop of some “mountain”. Would be better if the city wasn’t covered in haze.
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- Confucius say Word up!
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- Reminds me of LOTR with the treants.
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- Rub for good luck!
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- The area around was barricaded so this is perhaps the best shot of the Tiananmen square.
Day 1: Travelling to Beijing (28/09/09)
Oct 4th
Suitcases packed.
Wallet emptied out of any useless cards (man do I have a lot of useless cards).
iPhone ready.
Let’s roll out!
I was considering leaving my iphone at home but then where would my only source of internet be? I was hoping to use some free interwebs at the airport or at the hotel but you’ll find out soon enough how that goes.
Got on our first flight, QF128, to HK. Flying business. It’s amazing how little staff travel costs. The cost of my flight (including airport tax) is probably less than a flight to Brisbane. Honestly, flying business is the way to go for long distance travel. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to handle economy seats on any flight longer than 5 hours. Tiny seats, no leg room, constant worry about touching people and annoying people behind me by tilting the seat, terrible food…the list goes on.
The flight to HK went smoothly, I naturally went straight for the inflight entertainment (which I later found out runs on Windows CE), ended up watching Terminator Salvation, 1/4 of the Proposal (it was so slow and boring), Star Trek (2nd time watching it and the awesomeness is still there) and Duplicity. I sat next to my brother, who surprisingly wasn’t as annoying as before. That kid’s been to more places than I have…quite depressing.
We landed at HK at around 6:30pm HK time, got our luggage, checked out and went for the next flight. Surprise fucking surprise, we “missed” the flight, not enough time to check in, travel to domestic terminal and then walk to the boarding gate. Plan A has failed. But not to worry, Plan B is still in tact, we purchased “open-tickets” so that means we can fly whatever flight that cooperates with Qantas as long as there are seats. Walked over to the check-in of our second flight and they told us it’s actually a combined service with another airline so they cannot accept our tickets.
GG.
Plan C?
That’s the only downside to buying extremely MW airline tickets, you’re put on standby and not guaranteed and seats.
At this time my bro was tripping out. First time that I’ve really seen him scared. He was asking dumb questions like “What if we become homeless?”.
Sad James
Thankfully (sorta…but not really), there was this tourism salesperson standing around and heard our “plea”. Walked over and offered us tickets, HK$2000 per ticket. I’m like thinking GTFO but my parents were actually considering.
After haggling here and there we managed to get the price down to HK$1650 a ticket. It probably is cheaper to buy these tickets than staying at a hotel next to the airport, it’s around $400AUD for the night for a single room. After buying our tickets, we ran for the boarding gate. Except we realised that the boarding gate is at a another terminal and you reach that terminal by train. I looked at the watch…it was 8:00pm, the flight leaves at 8:03pm and the train is in 1 minute. I bolted like a crazy asian for the rice truck as soon as I got off the train in an attempt to hold the door so the rest of my family can get on (I had the image of Home Alone 2 in my head where they’re all running for the door and get in just as it was about to close). After running to the gate there was a sea of people lining up to board the flight, apparently it’s been delayed.
When we finally got on the plane the first thing I noticed (apart from the fact that I was sitting 3rd row from the back, the small seats and the lack of legroom) was the aroma of urine. I sat down on my seat and my seatbelt was wet. FML.
The food was also bloody terrible.
Exhibit A.
Here’s also the difference in legroom.
Economy
Business.
We finally arrived at our hotel at around midnight. We stayed at Crowne Plaza, the first 5 star hotel that I’ve stayed at. Everything is all very nice and clean, and they also have a door man! The guy just stands there and presses the up/down button for the elevator.
Here are some pics of the room.
That’s about it for the day. Forbidden palace coming up!
