China - Part 6 Tian'amen Square and the Forbidden City�

2004-11-01

Did Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden city in the morning. Felt weird to be walking where one lone pedestrian held off a string of tanks. That image stayed in my head all morning.

The best part of the morning was the kids.

Like kids everywhere, full of enthusiasm and hamming it up.

The square was full of people. One of our group wanted to go see the corpse of Chairman Mao, but the wait was over two hours. He also told us that in the corpse is lowered into a freezer when it's not on view, and brought up into a refrigerated glass coffin when it is on view. My favorite phrase of the day was Maosicle. I'm sure the Spouse got tired of hearing it.

Both Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City were undergoing renovation. They're already preparing for the 2008 Olympics.

Walking this area was dreadfully tiring. We'd had to get up at 6:30 to get on the bus and had had less than 8 hours of sleep in the 60 hours. I walked around in a daze most of the morning. Not a state conducive to clarity of thought.

The grounds were extremely crowded. Between fighting crowds, the construction and the pall of smog and overcast, this was not a pleasant day.

Everywhere we went we were assaulted by local people selling everything. Stamps, hats, souveniers of all types. When we left the area to go to our bus we had to stand in a circle facing in just to escape the barrage. A woman selling hats stepped in front of our oncoming bus, not hearing it's approach. I screamed "Look out!"; which didn't mean a thing to her.

One of our party, standing at the curb, reached out and pulled her out of the way with bare inches to spare. The incident left me even limper than I'd been before. The language gap had just been made very plain to me.

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