I did some research before we left home, and knew that there were a couple of parks just on the other side of the Forbidden City, so after lunch we headed that direction. We walked toward the Forbidden City, then turned right and walked along the walls of the city. The first park called Jingshan Park was just past the Forbidden City. We paid the entry fee of 10 RMB each (which is a little less than $1.50 ). The park was beautiful and had a large pagoda at the top of the hill that overlooked the city of Beijing and the Forbidden City.
There are a few steps to climb to get to the pagoda.
Oh, the crowds!
When we left Jingshan park, we left through the opposite entrance, walked about two blocks further away from our hotel and came to the next park called Beihai Park. Again, we paid the 10 RMB each to enter this park.
As we were walking, we realized that we seemed to be in a very military area of the city, and the streets that the map showed didn’t actually go through and were secured by guards, so we kept walking, and kept walking and kept walking.
We walked way beyond the end of the Forbidden City, and still there was no way to turn left to head back to the hotel. We finally came upon a street that went through, so we took a left and followed it. Before we knew it, we were at some sort of security check point. Everyone was getting out ID’s. Steve and I looked at each other, knowing that our passports were locked in the hotel safe, and wondered what we were going to do. It would be several miles to turn around and retrace our steps to get back to the hotel, so we both pulled out our Arizona drivers licenses and continued on. We handed the security guard our driver’s licenses and smiled nicely. He studied them pretty carefully and then let us through. We sent our bags through the scanner and continued on.
When we got through security, we realized that we were in Tiananmen Square. This certainly wasn’t where we intended to be, but it was fun!
There were huge crowds and lots of police everywhere. It looked like there was going to be some sort of event, so we waited around for a while, but nothing seemed to be happening, so we finally continued on our way.
The police gear is ready to go.
By this time, we were once again exhausted. Steve’s knees hurt, my feet hurt, and we were ready for some rest. We still had about a mile and a half to get back to the hotel, so we just kept pushing. Yes, we could have hailed a taxi, but what fun would that be?
We stopped at a little shop just down from our hotel, bought a couple of beers and headed to our room to get our shoes off and relax. Thank goodness for hotel slippers!!!
It was about 90 degrees and 90% humidity today, so we thought we did pretty well!
We didn’t even have enough energy to go out for dinner, so we ate our leftovers from lunch and called it a day.
As I sat down to write this post tonight, I quickly realized that my blog is blocked in China. I will have to write it in Word and then copy it over once we return home....Darn!
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