Today we will take our first excursion as part of the Viking Cruise Tour. This will be the first time we are going with a group here in Beijing, and we are sure it will be different than being on our own.
We did not need to meet in the lobby for the tour until 10:30 AM, so we slept in a little before getting ready and heading down to the breakfast buffet in the lobby area.
It was a bright sunny day, and we were glad that the weather here so far has been tremendous. We had a rain storm last night with some lightning, and we enjoyed watching it out of our large full-height window.
The buffet breakfast was good, but nothing great, and we were glad we were not paying the $40.00 per person charge like the first time we ate here, it is now included with the Viking Tour.
After breakfast, I worked on the blog since we were not leaving until 10:30 AM. It has been hard to keep up and obviously, I am behind, but we have been doing a lot here in China and that is also a good thing.
We went down to the lobby to meet up with our tour. We found our guide Michael, and he told us to go outside to the waiting bus. There were quite a few people gathered in the lobby, but they were not from our group. We headed out to the waiting bus and got on board. Most everyone was already on the bus, there were only a few people that got on behind us. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the bus was not nearly full. Of course, there was one couple that we all had to wait on. The lady had gotten separated from her husband, and she had thought he was on the bus. She had to go back inside the hotel to try to find him. Michael followed her to try and make sure that they did not linger, and a few minutes later, they were on the bus and we could leave, just a few minutes late.
Today we are heading to Tiananmen Square and to the Forbidden City, which is right next to the square. The bus ride took about 25 minutes in the traffic. While we were driving, Michael told us a few things and one was the three rules he had for the tour. Of course, the first one was to be on time. He said he would only wait about three minutes and then he was leaving. If anyone missed the bus, it was up to them to take alternate transportation to catch up to the tour. The next rule was for everyone to like everyone else on the tour, we were all going to be together as a group through the entire land tour until we returned to Beijing at the end, so we needed to get along. We would not be together on any cruise excursions except by happenstance, they are guided separately by guides from the ship. Michael was only our guide when we were hot on the cruise.
He also did not want people to single out any other persons in the group, and that was going to be tough, we already had one couple that was late, violating rule #1 on the first day, and they seemed disorganized.
The third rule was to comply with the rules, specifically, the Chinese government’s rules. If things changed because we were told to change something by the government, that was it, no questioning or protesting, that would get us in trouble. When in Rome so to speak……
Our driver pulled over into a designated bus parking are on the street and we all got off the bus. Michael told us we would go through several security checkpoints on the walk to the square and that we might need to show our passports.
It was a good walk just to get to the square from where the bus had dropped us off. It took about 15 minutes to get there. Once we arrived at the square, we went through another security checkpoint, but we did not have to show our passports.
We went into the square from one side and headed up that side to the middle. There was a building in the square which was the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, called The Memorial Hall, and his body is displayed inside in a glass box. He has been on display there since his death in 1976. They have a special team that is just in charge of preserving his body so he can be displayed to the public, but we were told that only his head is visible, his body is wrapped in a large Chinese flag. It was quite an impressive building.
Michael told us about several other building along the square as we walked, and one structure was one of the remaining gates from when the city was surrounded by a large wall, which has since been completely demolished. We were using our Viking supplied audio devices, which work well other than having to deal with the long, thin cords on the earpiece. We always hop that one day these will be Bluetooth capable where we could use our own earbuds. Next we walked to the middle of the square and were given about 20 minutes just to walk around on our own.
There was a large display in the middle of the square, which represented a giant flower bouquet, and was very colorful. This had been added recently for the upcoming Chinese National Holiday starting on October 1.
The National Holiday is a week long celebration commemorating the day that China was no longer under the Emperor’s rule and the Communist Party took over.
We all gathered up again at the designated meeting spot and headed into the Forbidden City, which is at one end of the square. The Forbidden City is quite large, and we were going to walk from this end through the entire length to the other side. There is also a gate there on that end, but there is no way in our out until you reach the other end, and that was where our bus would pick us up later in the day.
We had to go through a security check point where we had to scan our passports, and look into a camera for facial recognition against our passport photo. Stephanie had no problem, but mine did not want to work correctly, so I had to go to the side and the guard did something on her phone and then I could go through. I think I was too tall for the camera, my head was not really inside the box on the camera display. Most people here are much shorter and the camera was set to their height.
We also had to have our bags scanned and go through a metal detector.
We had to wait for an issue to get resolved, one man in our group had something in his backpack that was not being allowed past security. I am not sure what it was, but the man really caused a fuss about it. He was a boisterous person from New Jersey, and we all had to wait until Michael could calm him down before we could proceed on with the tour. He did not want to understand that he could not get back to this checkpoint later on, we had already walked quite a ways to this point from the bus drop off location, and there was no way to return here easily. The only option Michael could give him was to get someone to meet us at the other end, and they would have to carry the item outside to that point, which seemed impossible to get done.
We finally proceeded onward, we were not sure what the resolution was, or if there even was one. We did feel bad because no one with Viking had specifically told us not to bring any certain items that may be prohibited. Stephanie seemed to thing it was some type of foldable walking stick or monopod, she had seen him carrying it on his wrist, but again, we were not sure. We did not know the man’s name, and there were no introductions for everyone in our group, so Stephanie and I just nicknamed him Guido.
It was also about this time that i realized most all of the pictures I had taken up to this point in our tour today were terrible overexposed, and most likely ruined. I had forgotten to change my camera settings from last night when we were taking photos of the lighted dragon in the dark. Now, in the full sunshine, they were overexposed. Luckily, Stephanie was taking photos as well, and we had set her phone camera to take both JPG and RAW file types for each photo she was taking. I needed the RAW files for processing in Lightroom, it is just so much better. It was a hard lesson learned, but at last we had some backup.
The Forbidden City was impressive. There were several large buildings that we went through that had special purposes, and they gained importance the farther into the city we went.. Everything was in a long row, so we passed from one building to the next in a straight line down the middle. One of the most important buildings was the house for the Emperor. We will have to use Google to add in more detail about what we actually saw, it was too much to remember it all. The buildings were all designed the same with the same colors and architecture, so although impressive in size, it was a starting to get a little redundant.
It took over two hours to walk through the Forbidden City and look at all of the buildings. We were using our Audio devices most of the time for communication during the tour.
Michael gave us a lot of history and background on the various buildings, and some of the special architectural features on each. There are small animals lined up in a row on the roof at each of the four corners, and the more animals in the row, the more important the building. The Emperor’s house had the most, there were nine animals in a row on each corner of that building.
We could not go inside any of the buildings, and you could not really even get that close enough to the opening in each with all of the people, so it was really hard to see what was inside. The buildings were only lighted by natural lighting inside and so it was generally quite dark, and there was always a deep line of people at each opening, so after a while, we just gave up on trying to look inside. Michael did tell us that long ago, people were allowed inside of these building, but not any longer.
Occasionally, we were given about 15 minutes just to walk around and see things on our own. At one building on the side of the main structures, we were able to go inside to see some artifacts from the period that the Forbidden City was used as the home of the Emperor. We will try to add in some history of the city and the dynasties that used it, or provide a link to a website with additional information for anyone who wants to learn more about what is here in the Forbidden City
It was really sunny today and got quite hot walking outside. By the time we got to the gardens at the other end of the Forbidden City, everyone was pretty tired. It was a lot of walking and standing.
We did have to pause for a few minutes once we exited the security on this end. of the city Michael had somehow gotten one of the security people to carry the confiscated item Guido had lost in security through to this end and outside of the secured area, and he went over to the security building to get it. Michael gave it to Guido, and he was now happy. We were sure Michael probably had to pay a person walk it all the way to this other end, and it had to be someone in security to be able to get it to this side. really did not have much choice since he is also working for a tip at the end of the tour, as suggested by Viking, so he had to make this right or loose his tip from Guido altogether after just the second day!!!
After we exited the gate, we still had a long walk to the bus. According to Michael, there were no designated bus parking areas anywhere near the Forbidden City gates. Once again, we had to walk about 15 minutes or more before we arrived at a spot that our bus could park in and pick us up. Even this area was not designated for tour bus parking. Our bus had to meet us there once we all arrived, and we had to hurriedly get onto the bus once it arrived since it was actually a city bus stop and we could not block it if a city bus arrived.
From there, we headed back to the hotel. Once again, Michael told us about the dinner at the hotel tonight, so we now knew it was actually going to happen. I had posted yesterday that we did not know that any dinners were included from the sparse information we had, so we had questioned if this was true. Apparently it was. Dinner was going to be in the buffet from 6 PM to 9 PM.
We headed up to the room to rest, we were tired from all of the walking in the heat. Michael had told us we would walk over five miles today, and it certainly seemed to be that if not more by the time we walked around in the various locations we visited, plus getting to and from the bus.
At about 6:15 M, we headed down to the lobby to go to the dinner. They had closed the buffet for everyone but the Viking guests, and that was about 70 people. There were supposed to be around 60 rooms at the hotel for Viking guests, and there were three groups of twenty or so in each tour group, which was a good size, not too large.
The buffet was the same food we had the other night, again, nothing special, but there were a few good things out of all of the selections. They were also serving beer and sodas, so we had a Chinese Beer with our dinner and then sat around at the table enjoying a few more, why not, it was part of the Viking Tour package. We saw the manager Chris again tonight and thanked him for the gift he had given us the other night. He was too busy to talk with us tonight.
When we left, we took one of the bottles of beer that was in the ice tub and headed out. There were some other beers on the refrigerated shelf normally used for juices at the entrance to the breakfast buffet. We ran into Chris again on the way out and Stephanie asked him if we could get one more bottle of beer so we had two to take back to the room. He went and grabbed two, and now we had three.
We headed back upstairs and enjoyed one more beer as we watched the chaotic traffic on the street below.
It was getting late and we called it a night at about 9:45 PM, we were tired from all of the walking today, and we have an early tour tomorrow to the Great wall, we are leaving at 7:00 AM.
Patty Hinkle
Very interesting so far! Glad you are having a good trip!