In the morning, we
headed down a hutong opposite the hotel, on our towards the Forbidden
City. As we walked, we kept an eye out for somewhere to have
breakfast, but Western-style coffee shops were pretty thin on the
ground. What we did notice was a guy frying bread dough in a wok full
of oil, so we stopped to try some, grabbing some dumplings with a
strange green filling as well.
Not long after, we
reached the edge of the Forbidden City. We had a choice of turning
left or right and as I was pretty sure we were closer to the north
end, we turned right. Wrong choice. As so many tourists visit the
city, the authorities have instituted a one-way, south-to-north
entrance policy, so we had to walk all the way around to the other
end. It was already pretty warm, so we picked up some ice creams on
the way. After a while, we stopped beside the moat that surrounds the
city and as we sat eating our ice creams, a group of domestic
tourists walked past. Two of them – middle-aged women both –
slowed and openly stared, nay gawked, at the girls. We laughed a
little nervously as they walked on, turning repeatedly to continue to
look at the girls.
A few minutes later,
I noticed another women stop nearby, take her phone from her handbag
and then studiously attempt to set up a selfie. I was getting the
feeling that she was trying to get the girls into the shot behind her
and when she noticed me looking at her, she came over, handed her
phone to Kate and asked to have a photo taken with the girls. This
was the first in a very long line of such incidents that has
continued ever since. In the process of having those photos taken
with them, people have plonked babies beside them and in their arms,
put their arms around them, stroked their hair and their arms, held
their hands and told them repeatedly how beautiful they are. When
passersby notice other passersby having their photos taken with the
girls, they stop, look, and ask if they can have their photos taken
with the girls, too. You can spot them a mile off – they're walking
along, they spot one or both of the girls, they do a double-take,
their progress slows as they reach into their bag/pocket for their
phone, and then it all starts. At one point today, as we were eating
lunch, Kate noticed a man outside the restaurant, crouched down
beside the window taking a photo of the girls – if it wasn't so
comical it might be a tad creepy...
We eventually
reached the south entrance and were slightly overwhelmed by the
hordes of people milling around. However, everything seemed extremely
orderly and the various streams of people seemed to be moving quite
quickly, so we joined a (mercifully shady) queue and sure enough were
soon heading through the front gates and into the city itself
(otherwise known as the Palace Museum). The sheer number of people
inside the walls was pretty staggering, but everything was very
efficient and the crowds moved quite fluidly past the very grand,
ornate palace buildings.
We eventually made
it back to the north entrance, where we sat for a while in the shade,
the girls posing for yet more photos. We then headed back down to the
south entrance, stopping for some lunch along the way (and more
photos). We then headed for Tiananmen Square, but when we got within
its general vicinity we found ourselves being herded into a very
slowly moving queue to pass through some sort of security check. As
we didn't really want to see the square quite badly enough to stand
around waiting in a queue, we turned around and went down into the
nearby metro station and travelled out to the Silk Market. We're
quite keen to buy some cheap clothes to replace and or/supplement
those that we've brought and were told that this was the clothing
market, but when we got there, we found that it was a big building
filled with little shop/stalls selling mostly fairly fancy but
generally fairly hideous clothing of various sorts, as well as
electronic goods, toys and so on. The clothes weren't really what we
were looking for, but we were in need of a USB charging cord, which
we duly found. The ticket said it was 120 yuan, but without any sort
of hard bargaining, we managed to pick one up for 20. The range of
electrical goodies on offer was pretty amazing, and if we didn't have
to carry everything we purchased on our backs, I'm sure would have
bought more (Scott would have been in heaven!).
Up on the top floor,
we stopped to gawp at the incredible Beijing skyline and then went
into a hotpot restaurant – managing somehow to navigate the menu
and order a pile of veges, noodles, fungi and meat, which we then
cooked in the boiling wok of stock on the induction stove in our
table. Then it was back on the metro and back towards our hostel.
When we exited the metro station, we came across a little bakery that
was to become one of our choice hangouts in Beijing. Bakeries are
ubiquitous in China – all making the same general range of sweet
and savoury pastries, which they display in little brightly lit
perspex compartments. The idea is, you get a tray and some tongs,
open the front door of the compartment and pick out what you want.
Holiland is a Beijing-only chain and a bit more upmarket than your
average Chinese bakery. They have a good range of wonderful little
treats, including some great sugar-covered 'mini doughnut bites'.
They also do a good, reasonably priced coffee, which isn't something
you come across very often in China. And the stores are air
conditioned, clean and have a big window where you can look at the
chefs making the products. We sat here for a while, recuperating (and Zoe cleaned the black marks of her face - dirt she had got on her fingers as she came up from the metro), and
then headed across the busy intersection to a big supermarket – not
because we needed anything but because we love checking out foreign
supermarkets.
Now, in Sydney and
Winchester, I used to love just stopping into the Asian supermarkets
to see what was on offer. I find the different products fascinating
because they're often to weird and wonderful – things that you
would never have thought of eating, and have no idea how to use. I
would often buy something strange just so I could take it home and
try to figure out what to do with it. And now, I was in an actual
Asian supermarket! Spread out over three floors! Bliss! We slowly
made our way up and down the aisles and up through the floors. At the
bottom was the usual staple foodstuffs – rice, sauces, packets and
jars of this, that and the other. The top floor was household
products. The second floor was where the real action was – fresh
fruit and veg (including some very strange little green fruits that are somehow grown into the shape of a little old man, Buddha probably), meat and fish, cooked and fresh and live, eggs of all
shapes and sizes, and so on. The live stuff was the most fascinating
– there were even live turtles! We bought various types of unusual
fruit and went back to our room to experiment with it.
For dinner we went
to a popular place just down the road from our hostel - a halal
barbecue restaurant where we had to get a little help with the menu,
pointing at the pictures of various types of meat on skewers and
asking first what type of animal it came from and second where on the
animal it came from. The food, when it came, was delicious and we ate
it perched on little stools at a little table outside the restaurant,
watching the passing hutong traffic.
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