August 26: 北京

I just typed several sentences in English but with my Chinese keyboard on.  Strings upon strings of gibberish.

Chinese language placement test today.  As soon as it was finished i am pretty sure everybody just blacked it out of their memory. (I was put in 301, the fourth level for the program and the highest).  Soon after we were on a bus on our way to the center of Beijing, the Forbidden City.  Outside the city, at Tiananmen, the gate with Mao's picture on it, we stopped for a group photo.  The photo op turned out to be for more than us.  Multiple Chinese people stopped to take a picture of us as we posed for out picture, not with us, just of us. ^

The male has a ball under his paw, or the world.

  The female has a cub under her paw.

The Imperial Garden

Inside the city walls we walked the many many courtyards where small children could be spotted dropping their pants and squating.  The city was beautiful but much of the same with courtyard after courtyard of similar looking buildings.  The buildings had yellow roofs to signify that the Emperor had been in or was closely associated with the building, green roofs for the living quarters of the princes, and black for the libraries.  Each color symbolizes an element, water=black, fire=red, wood=blue-green, metal=white, earth=yellow.  Only the emperor could wear yellow. At the corner of each roof there were also animals carved, always in the same order.  The more animals there were the more important the building was.  I suppose it is that, the god riding the rooster led the beasts behind to defend the buildings.

We climbed the hill to the north of the Forbidden City, Jingshan Park, where the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty hung himself.  The hill was created from the excavated dirt of the city moat.  This is the view of the Forbidden City from the top.  And yes, that's smog, possibly mixed with some clouds, it had rained earlier that day.

Fun Facts:  As a defense, walls were built beneath the Forbidden City to prevent enemies from tunneling under.  The bricks of stone making up the expansive courtyards were hauled over a road that was flooded and frozen.

I'll finish typing this up tomorrow, we did a lot of stuff on this day.