Since we had such a long day yesterday, we decided to sleep
in a bit today. We were up and out of the hostel by 9:30. We had one of our
first real sit down breakfasts. Yummy Chinese pancakes (I actually got a black
sesame porridge which was also very good).
We successfully navigated the subway to the South side of
the Forbidden City: Tiananmen Square. The buildings in the Forbidden City were
nicely kept up. Their roof tiles were a glimmering gold with the roof beams
painted in red and blue color schemes. It was pretty crowded, but quite
enjoyable to wander through. The descriptive signs had some of the best English
translations that I had seen all trip, which was really nice. However, it did
take three tries to successfully find one of the gardens. That was very
interesting to me, there were a lot more trees and rocks and less bushes and
flowers than I would have expected. There were a few little museums in the
complex, but apparently all the good artifacts are in Taiwan – VA 2013?
We next decided to go to the South Cathedral, which we
decided was walkable; however, we went the wrong way to start with and the walk
was a bit longer than expected: oops. They were doing some major reconstruction
of the courtyard in front and we weren’t sure at first if we could enter (which
would’ve been a major bummer). But the workers said it was fine, and they
weren’t that upset when Eric walked through their wet concrete. It was a nice
cathedral, decently maintained, but nothing particularly striking about it.
From some of the pictures on display and the fact that there were some people
praying inside when we went it, they seemed to have a vibrant community, which
was nice to see. This was quite the contrast to when we were teaching the kids
about holidays last week. To explain Christianity and Christians, I came up
with an analogy: Christianity is to Religion as basketball is to sports. And
Christians are to Christianity as players are to basketball.
The shopping area we headed to next was actually a mall and
not really a place to barter (which is what we really wanted). We wandered a
bit and grabbed dinner there (typical Chinese fast food chains: i.e. Kung Fu).
I did buy a cheap dragon ring at the mall! I had been looking for one all trip.
Our next destination was the Olympic Park, which we took the
subway to get to. Surprise! It’s the Chinese Valentine’s Day, so everyone and
their cousins were taking the subway. I think that was one of the most crowded
masses of humanity I have ever been in (at least in such a small place), but it
was relatively orderly and always kept moving. I’m not just talking about the
subway cars. The stations and tunnels between train lines were packed. At one
point we grabbed each other’s shoulders in conga line formation to efficiently
weave through the crowd without losing anyone. That kind of turned into a
temporary massage train and I’m sure we got a few weird looks. Though not as
many looks as when we were singing love songs (in spirit of the holiday) in the
subway. Anyways, after three changes and four trains we successfully made it to
Olympic Park with only one little incident of everyone tripping over a suitcase
in the doorway on the way out of the subway. The Chinese, who normally aren’t
very good at forming lines (cutting in line is very common), were very good at
lining up at the sides of the train doors to get on and letting people off in
the middle.
The Park was a bit more crowded than I expected, but it was
very cool to see the Bird’s Nest and the Ice Cube lit up at night. There were
also some pretty sweet glowing kites, though we never figured out where they
originated. We ended our evening on the quite lovely McPatio eating our
McFlurries and listening to the same (English) song on repeat (“I Will Wait for
You”).
-Gina
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