Headed home soon

Today was my last day in Beijing. I spent the last two days doing tourist stuff, like the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, and the Summer Palace. Something I ate yesterday disagreed with me, so I decided to cut it off early today and chill out in my hotel room with some room service and HBO.

The pollution in Beijing is unreal. I doubt anybody that has never been to China can even imagine how bad it gets. You can start to get a sense of it in some of my newer pictures... literally, the buildings across the street are hazy.

Forbidden City was the home of emperors and was off limits to regular people for 500 years. This place is a MASSIVE fortress. When I was walking around I would walk to the end of a long corridor, and come to a giant courtyard. On the other side of the courtyard would be another really long corridor leading to another giant courtyard. Very impressive. Now it is a museum with different kinds of exhibits in each room. There are ancient vases, art, bronze works, and military weapons.

At the south end of the forbidden city is tiananmen square. I'm sure there are times when the square is more active, but it is basically empty during the week. They are doing lots of construction everywhere making the city nice for the olympics and the square is no exception. Hard to imagine the atrocities of 1989, but if you look at my pictures you can see one of the streets where the famous Tank Man stood in front of a tank in protest. Good story, worth reading if you don't know about it. No, he did not get run over by the tank.

I spent this morning at the Summer Palace. Apparently there is so much brick at the Forbidden City that it would get ridiculously hot in the summer, the emperors built some lakes and threw up some walls and called it a summer palace. At 2.7 square kilometers (1 square mile) it is a nice little getaway pad.

I've updated the Beijing Photos with the photos from these last 2 days.