Day 5 – After a decent night sleep in the expensive condo that my dad’s friend was kind enough to let us use, we decided to go out to Tienanmen square. We took a cab to the subway station. One observation.. it’s so freakin hot and humid, how are the locals wearing dress pants and button up shirts? Some are even wearing jackets!
We didn’t go into the Forbidden City today (it’s behind the red wall). We walked around the main gathering ground on Tienanmen square and walked a few blocks to the Beijing Opera House. After seeing the buildings, I realized that the Chinese don’t build anything small. The modern buildings are massively huge. It has to be to fit that many people in there. The opera house was shaped like half an egg with water around it so that with the reflection, it looks like a whole egg. Inside had some interesting architecture, some costumes that was used in plays and a small museum of stringed instruments. After seeing the opera house, we went across the street for a lunch of noodles and dumplings. After that, we went to another ancient site with several short round pagodas and then we went shopping.
Dinner was duck… Peking duck in Peking (Peking = Beijing). Remember how I said everything was built big in China? This restaurant was famous for it’s Peking duck and it was 7 floors… After dinner, we went for a stroll at a street market that served street food on sticks. Most of the stuff was labeled but I wasn’t hungry enough to try it, especially after a dinner of duck… At the street market, we bumped into a camera crew from the BBC shooting a documentary, I had a nice conversation with a pretty British woman about Jeremy Clarkson. She said he was a bumbling idiot… lol Sadly, he wasn’t around… that would’ve been great… bumping into Jeremy Clarkson while on vacation in Beijing.
