Beijing or as we call it - The Renovated city (every thing need to be perfectly fixed for the Olympic games), is the capital of People's republic of China, with it's 17.5 Million people you feel like a small dust in the wind, and here you can be assure to inhale some dust alright.
After a long journey by train from Hong Kong (25 hours) we arrived from one crowded city to another but nevertheless you feel here more calm. Generally we found people here are more friendly and smiling than HK, from the first glance it seems very vulgarian while many people spit everywhere, from childhood 'till elderly, smoke all the time and push their way into the busy subway.
traveling here is not easy like what we have been use to, the language barrier become more relevant than ever, most of the people can not understand English, those who does, speak very poorly. No doubt we proofed our pantomime increasingly recent days, and the bad news, it is going to be worse in other parts of China once we get out of Beijing ...
Temple of Heaven:
The Temple of Heaven is a worthwhile visiting place in Beijing. It is much bigger than the Forbidden City and smaller than the Summer Palace with an area of about 2,700,000 square meters. The Temple was built in 1420 A.D. during the Ming Dynasty to offer sacrifice to Heaven. As Chinese emperors called themselves 'The Son of Heaven' ,they dared not to build their own dwelling,'Forbidden City' bigger than a dwelling for Heaven.
The Temple of Heaven is enclosed with a long wall. The northern part within the wall is semicircular symbolizing the heavens and the southern part is square symbolizing the earth.
At last we had the opportunity to explore a little bit the Chinese history and culture in that place, and we found out that the more you explore the more you realize how complicated and interesting this culture is.
Tiananmen Square:
Located at the center of Beijing City is Tiananmen Square (440,000 square meters), where we visited Tiananmen Tower, Monument to the People's Heroes, Great Hall of the People, Mao Zedong Memorial Hall and see the national flag raising ceremony. Thousands of people come to the Square every day.
At the north end of the Square is Tiananmen Tower, built in 1417, the Square was the front door of the Forbidden City.
The granite Monument to the People's Heroes is just at the center of the Tiananmen Square. Built in 1952, it is the largest monument in China's history.
Mao Zedong Memorial Hall is at the south side of the Square. This Hall is divided into three halls and Mao Zedong (head of the communist party) body lies in a crystal coffin in one of them.
Forbidden City:
The Forbidden City was the imperial palace during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Rectangular in shape, it is the world's largest palace complex. Surrounded by a six meter deep moat and a ten meter high wall are 9,999 buildings. Construction of the palace complex began in 1407, It was completed fourteen years later in 1420. It was said that a million workers including one hundred thousand artisans were driven into the long-term hard labor.
It was called The Forbidden City because during 500 years the entrance was not allowed for the non royal people, well, you can say that in the past an entrance fee had been terrible death, but now it's "only" 60 Yuan (30 Shekels).
The Great Wall:
The Great Wall of China, one of the greatest wonders of the world, was enlisted in the World Heritage by UNESCO in 1987. Just like a gigantic dragon, the Great Wall winds up and down across deserts, grasslands, mountains and plateaus, stretching approximately 6,700 kilometers from east to west of China. With a history of more than 2000 years, some of the sections of the great wall are now in ruins or even entirely disappeared.
To the great wall and Qind Dynasty tombs we took an organized Chinese tour. a big mistake !!!
before seeing the wall, we had to visit other "tourist places" - commission factories. these places manufacture all kinds of tourist gifts with very high prices, the tour company get the commissions for bringing us to shop, we didn't give a damn about shopping anything that day, we just wanted to climb the great wall already. Only at 14:00 we started the real deal, that didn't give us much time to spend in the tombs and the wall, the operator rushed us all the time, we felt like going back several of years to our military training time. It is worth to mansion the Chinese tourists were acted like robots during all the trip and played along this blackmail. The lesson learned - No more Organised Chinese tours.
Today we have a flight to Urumuqi in west of China, it's almost 4 hours flight and we are suppose to arrive to the farrest city from any ocean in the world.
Since we already filled up all our storage in picasa web album, we had to open a new account, for extra storage, so from now on, all the new photos will be at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/yoni.efrat
Have fun,
Efrat and Yoni.
Our New Photo Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/yoni.efrat
Our Old Photo Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/yonifln
Our Movie Library: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=yonifln
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