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.

Dou Jiang You Tiao

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!