Today is a Chinese National Labor Day. The crowds of people at these national landmarks were unbelievable. We got to this location buy the Beijing subway. Right off the subway we came up at the performing arts center, which is an amazing building which has laser light shows reflected off the side of it and it appears to floating on a reflecting pond.
While around the performance center it seems that a local felt bad about the way I tease and torment Mengchen that he decides to flog me with a paper brochure!
While we were here a couple asked me to take a picture of them against the backdrop of the performing arts building. CybarWorks the orient addition jumped into action! While I was trying to help them figure out the operation of this camera Mengchen was going crazy documenting my usefulness to the others here in Beijing.
We then found our way down to Tian'anmen Square. I found a few things very interesting here. First the subways here and all the parks here make you xray any bags that you may be carrying, and there are security cameras everywhere. In some of the pictures it seems that there are 5-6 cameras on every post in the square.
We then found our way across to the Forbidden City. There are a couple pictures of the crowds of people. I can later use these pictures in the game I like to play "Where is Beijing is Mengchen?"
At this point we needed tickets to get into the city, and do to the credit card situation the Bank of America put me in I resorted to begging to get a ticket, as can be seen here. Fortunately for me, We got in by Mengchen using her professional guide status to score us tickets to go through the City. This was a very interesting place and the pictures that I have seen do not do it justice. It is quite an amazing place.
It was during this time that my back was starting to hurt a bit from the long trip over. Mengchen setup to have a professional Chinese massage that night. That should have been a red flag, but my back was hurting from the sleep that I have gotten on the plane.
After the forbidden city, we did lunch. Instead we took another cab ride and went to a nice Russian restaurant. For those who do not know, Mengchen is fluent in Chinese, Russian, and English. She learned Russian by living in that country for 5 years of study. The food was good. Here are a few pictures of the dining experience.
And this is when my knee started to hurt, but I had pressed on.. and I still have lost my camera ownership! We decided to go back to the hotel so I could rest my knee.