Bejing: Day 2: Summer Palace:

We woke up just afte 8 and hit the snooze a couple of times, getting up around 8:15 to be ready for breakfast at 8:30. Our hostess had asked us at checkin yesterday what we would like for breakfast (and that it was included with our stay, and we said eggs, milk, bread, and any fruit would be great. So today we got up and saw they had some mini-clementines, and bread sitting out. We asked the hostess if it was for us and she said that it was and the manager was cooking us our eggs at that moment. Wowza! That’s service! She brought us some hot milk (weird, but great) as well as some fried eggs (fried in soy sauce I think) which were great as an egg sandwich. Afterwards we got our stuff together and left the hotel for our day out at the summer palace. Despite getting some directions from our hostess, we opted to take a different path in case we could walk from the subway stop (since our Beijing map made it look like it was only 2km or so from the stop.) We made it to our stop with little effort but after walking for just a bit we figured that since the other foreigners (and chinese) seemed to be opting for taxi’s, we should try the same. We hailed a cab and hopped in and showed him the map. He told us no to the stop, making us 0-3 on figuring out WTF is wrong with taxi drivers here and why they’re so feakin’ picky. Well, we asked the taxi behind him (because he had kinda pointed at it) and that guy said yes. So we took the taxi with him out there, and even getting stuck in some traffic it only was about $4.50 to get out there. The summer palace was about 8$ each, despite a sign saying that in the off season it was only 20 for us, but alas I didn’t press the issue and we payed 50 rmb each. (6 to 1 ratio fyi). We entered at the east gate and perused the south end first, which included a beautiful bridge that linked a small island, a bronze ox to ward off floods, as well as a large pavillion with 16 pillars. We went over to the island and poked around and looked at some of the buildings. They were nice but weren’t particularly eye-popping. It did give us a great view of the main complex area, which is where we headed to next.
A 10 minute walk got us up north towards the main complex area, which we went on into and began to look around at. This area included tons of courtyards, including the Jade pavillion which the last real Emperor of China was imprisoned in towards the end of his life while the Empress dowager was off being a tart.
Some of the woodwork here, while being restored, was still amazingly intricate and opulent. Some of the pictures really help do it justice in regards to just how vibrant and overwhelming it is. This was driven home by the walk along a causeway that’s roughly 2600 ft. long that contains over 10,000 original paintings within it. It’s practically impossible to take in and you end up just barely glancing at them as you walk by.
We finally started the trek up to the temples at the top of the hill, which included some scenic walking along the outskirts as well as some steep steeps along the front of the main temple. Again, the scale of this was extremely impessive and something that I’ll remember forever. Upon reaching the summit, we looked around inside and saw that there was a temple for Buddah, which we (I, ike,) accidently snapped a photo of when I wasn’t supposed to. It turns out that there was one final push to the actual top in another temple that is obscured / seems to blend into the first temple from a ways out. So we continued to walk up the rock pathways that were built while admiring the scenery. The final top was much more subdued on the inside (while being pretty imposing on the outside) and included another budda statue. Afterwards we made a long decent down through another pathway that was more sloping paths instead of strict stairs. While we had a general idea of where we were going, the simple fact was that it isn’t difficult to get lost on a 587-acre complex like this.
We made our way to a large pavillion/boat that has a wooden superstructure on top of a rock base that is painted to look like marble. The empress dowage Cixi made sure to use money to renovate the navy in the early 1900’s to build this. Mean, I guess technically it was for a boat, right?
Afterwards we started the hike back to the other side and just enjoyed the walk for the next 20 minutes. As we were nearing a special exhibit of some of the treasures of the Summer palace, we got an unexpected pleasant surprise. A little boy came up and started talking with us! In english! (Bethany and I both looked around when he first showed up thinking he may be one of those distractions while someone else rolls in and goes for a pickpocket) but it turned out he was just a genuinely awesome kid who wanted to chat with us in english! He was 8, and asked us things like “Where are you from? What do you do? What’s the climate like there?” He even asked us about the olympics and asked how many medals the USA got. I said, “well, I think we got 40 or so gold medals, but not as many as China” and the boy said “no no no, how many medals….*moving his hands back and forth*” “oh…altogether?’’ “yeah!” and proceeded to tell us he thinks America is awesome and he’s hoping to go there in two years to live with his Uncle in New York. Afterwards he said goodbye and shook our hands! Pretty much adorable, and we had most of this conversation near the entrace to the next exhibition, and the lady who was punching tickets chuckled after we finished chatting with the kid because she also realized just how darn cute he was.

Day 2 Observations: Chinese people are built bigger than Korean and Japanese (I’m guessing from their more robust diet) :-P

TBC