Day 2 in China
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
After a terrific day walking on the Great Wall and dining on Peking Duck, my second day in Beijing was bound to be a bit anticlimactic. It was a pleasant walk from my hostel, the Happy Dragon, to the Forbidden City. Once I arrived, though, I could see it was no longer exactly forbidden. In fact, my arrival appeared to have coincided with an enormous pulse of Chinese tour groups, and I was soon entrained into a mass of pushing, shoving, humanity. Although the Forbidden City (aka Imperial Palace) is the oldest, most important structure in Beijing, dating from the Ming Dynasty (around 500 ya), it was difficult to get a feel for the place, let alone get some pictures of the interiors of the pagodas. I finally was able to chill out a little in the royal garden, and the return trip to the South Gate was slightly less frenetic. I then walked up to Tianammen Sq., taking the obligatory pictures of Chairman Mao and the Revolutionary Monuments. TS is supposed to be the largest plaza in the world, but I didn’t see a single bench or seat there – guess they don’t want to encourage loitering.
After that, I decided to try to find the Museum of Natural History. I walked quite a ways, using my map and compass. It looked like I was fairly close, when I commited the cardinal sin of letting a sidecar taxi driver see me looking at the map. He asked me what I was looking for, then told me he would take me there. Of course I asked him the fare first, and he said “two”, which seemed a little low, but I knew I was within a block or two. As we started driving, the direction seemed a little off course. About 5 minutes later he stopped at what he said was the place, and I handed him the 2 Yuan. “No” he said, and indicated with his cell phone that the fare was 200 Y (around $33!). When I refused to pay, he lowered the price to 150 Y, wherupon I put $4 in his hand and walked away.
I finally had the opportunity to try out the GPS on my Iphone, and it turned out I had been displaced about 1 mile from the museum, so I walked there, arriving 30 min before closing. The museum was nice, very relaxing after my tour of the city, and there was a good collection of dinosaurs collected in the Mongolian desert. As I was walking back, the taxi driver came up behind me and asked me if I needed a ride!
So my lessons learned were:
1) Never let anyone see you looking at a map on the street, and
2) Make sure that “two” doesn’t mean two hundred or two thousand
Today, I might try the Summer Palace – that should do it for me for palaces for awhile.
plight69