In communist China, locals fascinated by you!

(I double-posted to catch myself up, because it wouldn’t let me on for long enough to post yesterday.  Check the previous post for my visit to the Great Wall and some other stuff that wasn’t as cool as the Great Wall.)

I feel like a celebrity here.

Today, we went to the Summer Palace, which I can (totally objectively) say is way better than the Fobidden City, and I don’t know why the Emperor didn’t just live there all the time with his 3000 concubines.  They could have played Beach Volleyball, and that would have been awesome.  I got a whole pile of pictures, but not nearly a many pictures as people got of me.  It was actually quite flattering how often people, girls especially, would run up to me waving a camera and asking for shots.  One of them said something to me after the picture that I obviously didn’t catch, but our guide helpfully translated: You are very handsome.

Westerers are a novelty here, everyone wants one.

The pictures were flattering, but in many cases the stares were just creepy.  I noticed a lot of people snapping pictures of me from afar, many cell phones and cameras pointed my way.  Some people just stood there and stared right at me, never blinking or shying away when I made eye contact with them, never responding to a smile or wave.  My dad caught more stares than me for his red hair, of course.

Anyways, this journal isn’t about me.  Summer Palace.  Unbelievable.  It was built around a lake named after the city we’ll be staying in later, Kun’ming, and there are temples and monuments everywhere.  The crowds were extremely dense because today is some national holiday that our Tour guide just called May day or something like that.  First of May, guess it makes sense.  The Summer Palace is closely tied to the legend of the Dragon Lady, who was originally one of the Emperor’s concubines, and wound up exercising tight control of the entire Chinese empire for something like 48 years, acting through puppet rulers and her own son(s).  I learned that hackey sack is a popular pass-time here, except they use some bizarre cross between a hackey sack and a badminton birdie, and the rules of the game insist that you only get one kick each time the sack comes to you.  Personally, I prefer the western version where you get to showboat.

There were a few performances going on in some of the pagodas, and lots of other stuff to see.  Most prominantly, a giant temple rest close to the shore, presiding over the entire place.  The Long Corridor (or something like that) stretches around the lake, and is painted with something like 10,000 unique pictures on each of the crosswise beams, and I know we got at least a few pictures, which I’ll try to post as soon as I can.  We saw a guy writing on the floor tiles using a water brush, and I took a few pictures.  He noticed and taught me how to write “OK” in Chinese.  Then he handed me the brush, so I wrote “Hello from Canada” on the walk.  He started to teach me characters for earth, sky and something I didn’t understand, and we thanked him and moved on before our lesson in Chinese could really take off.  We took a dragon boat across the lake for 10 yuan apiece, which was worth getting off our feet if nothing else.  Words fail to describe the Summer Palace, so hopefully pictures will do a better job when I have access to better internets.

It's pretty much giant.

After the Summer Palace, we were duped into another jewelery store masquerading as a tourist attraction.  This place, though, was pretty neat.  Apparently, one of the interesting things about Kun’ming lake is that the water is very high in mineral content, and the fresh-water oysters in the lake absorb a lot of it.  These oysters produce tons of pearls.  A single oyster had 30 when we opened it up, and they looked every bit as beautiful as the salt-water pearls.  The mineral content that the oysters absorb result in different colour pearls.  He even gave us a few as souveneirs, after the demonstration was over.  Of course, we were then led into the store, where my mom was eventually persuaded to buy a nice necklace/earring set.  Ultimately, they got their yuan for them.

We had lunch upstairs (yes, this place was also a restaurant, and a classy one at that) and then we were off to see another great tourist attraction: Tiananmen square.  JoJo tells us that Tiananmen square can hold up to half a million people at capacity, and that the guy in the huge picture visible on the edge was Chairman Mao, who led the country through the first extended reign of peace in hundreds of years.  Four statues surround the square to commemorate China’s victories in various wars, and their construction is fairly elaborate and inarguably heroic.  There is a GIANT tablet erected in the center of the square.  Also in the center of the square, there are two huge LED monitors showing what appeared to be non-stop China commercials, and a massive picture of some guy (I never found out who) in the middle of them.  Tiananmen Square is really a place one goes for the historical significance, because what it is to an uninformed tourist is a lot of empty space.  For that reason, it is also difficult to make a paragraph out of.  Oh yeah, did I mention it was over 30 celcius and the sun was beating down on us the whole time?  Moving on.

Next on the list, we went to see the Temple of Heaven.  The temple grounds are more of an attraction than the structure itself, because the temple grounds (covering 2.73 square kilometers according to the purveyor of all knowledge) are incredibly gorgeous and well-kept, and are home to performers, of all stripes.  Also people trying to sell us Rolex watches for $10.  We found out that pointing your camera at their watches is a great way to get rid of them.  They just close their cases up and take off.  We toured the Temple grounds for a while and gawked over the enormous gates that were constructed to guard it.  The interior of the temple was closed off when we arrived, but we got to see it from the outside, which was impressive enough.  The roof of the building was blue to signify heaven, as opposed to the roofs in the Forbidden City, which were yellow to signify royalty.  Everything in the Temple of Heaven is arranged in 3s, which is an important number in Feng Shui (like everything else in China).  3 signifies the number of everything: The heavens, the earth, and all the living beings that inhabit the space in between.  The temple has three sections there are three flights of stairs leading up to it, each with nine stairs, there are three main sections in the Temple grounds, and three builings in each section.

After the Temple of Heaven, we headed to see a show called the Legend of Kung Fu (http://www.chunyi-kungfu.com/home/) (I’ll hotlink it when the internet stabilizes, but I wanted to make sure that was posted).  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any pictures of this event, but it was a hell of a show that featured all kinds of over-the-top acrobatics and people getting slabs of stone broken on them and beds of nails and swords and stuff.  Children did flips off their heads.  People broke sticks on their limbs and heads more times than I could count.  A man bent spearheads with his throat.  Suffice to say he was hardcore.

Finally, to finish off the night, we went and had Beijing’s signature dish: Peking duck.  The restaurant we went to has no English name, and the Chinese pronunciation is beyond my ability to reproduce, especially here.  The food was phenomenal.  The duck itself was beautifully done, which is of course to be expected.  They served it with some kind of dark sauce, though, that made it incredible.  I could have eaten it forever and never grown tired of it.  Dad said at some point that he could go for a burger or something that wasn’t Chinese food, but I think he’s crazy.  We’ve eaten nothing but incredibly delicious food since we got here.  We have yet to try anything really interesting, but hey, there’s always Xi’an and Shanghai, plus ten days in Kun’ming.

By the time I got home tonight, I could barely remember what we did this morning, I was so exhausted.  This trip is going to kill me, but it will be an awesome way to die.  Thanks for reading!