No biting the personnel

It’s been a few days already. Since the last entry we’ve visited the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and the Summer Palace. Each of these works is incredible.

The Forbidden City is a massive construction in the center of town facing the Tiananmen square. By the way, searching from the hotel room’s internet connection for Tiananmen in Google immediately brings up the picture of the student and the tanks. However, I can’t seem to access wikipedia.org. Moreover, this is the flakiest internet connection I’ve used yet. Every new connection has a ~30 second delay.

Anyways, the Forbidden City was fantastic. The pictures barely do it justice. I’d like to bring your attention for a second to the lions. No, lions are not native of China. Yet, they’re used as the entrance guards to the important complexes. They’re always a pair. Facing the door, the right lion is the male; it has its right paw on a ball. The left lion is the female; she has her left paw on the tummy of a lion cub. Her claws are playing with its claws. It’s very cute. At least, that’s the idea. On poor quality statues, the lioness looks as if she’s squishing the cub.

The wall… A friend of one of the uncles drove us to two of the segments of the wall about an hour out of town. For the first segment, we went up with the parents using a gondola. Only later did we realize that there was also a roller coaster going up to the wall. It looked like a lot of fun. S and I walked the entirety of the segment that was opened to tourists. In movies they have cars driving on the wall. Although you could fit a small car on the wall, I’d like to see what car can drive up those stairs. After all the wall follows the top of the hills not bottom of the valleys. Walking the wall is a workout. Our quads, gluts and calves are shot.

Driving to the wall was also an experience. For the record, the luxury car brand of choice here is Audi. I’ve been told that A4s are more expensive than A6s since they’re more maneuverable. Although there’s some logic to the driving in the city (the larger and heavier vehicles win), it’s still very hectic. The average cyclist is very nimble. For example, they could easily squeeze between two moving cars, navigate the pedestrian traffic of pike place market (ou un trottoir de la rue St-Catherine). At first I thought the accident rate would be really high but now I’m not so convinced anymore: I’ve yet to see a scratch on a car or a driver yapping on a cell phone. Going back to brands, the Volkswagen Jetta and Passat are fairly popular too and I’ve counted a lot of Buicks and Hyundai. Most striking though are the trucks on the highways: many are carrying much more weight than what their manufacturer intended. As a result it’s common to see trucks going up a hill at 8 mph being passed by cars (or other trucks) on the right and on the left at much higher speed.

You’ll notice I’m not telling you much about the sites themselves. The pictures will say a lot more than I ever could write.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Travel, Asia 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.