New Concepty English

Prior to the Olympics, there was a massive effort to clean up bad English in Beijing. They did a good job of it, and it's kind of too bad, really, the end of an era. Fortunately, China is a big place. It will take many years to make even a small dent in the nationwide supply of Chinglish.

I did find one funny sign in Beijing while we were there.

The Forbidden City

Just a few quick pictures of the Forbidden City from our May trip to Beijing. It really is immense and impressive. However, I did have, in a way, a bit of a strange reaction to it. Generally, this is the first great stop that tourists make in China. Under those circumstances, I can see that it would be quite overwhelming. But after nearly a year of living here, I have to say I felt a bit jaded. We've seen a lot of this sort of thing, just never quite so big.

In any case, it really is a fascinating companion to the some of the other great palaces I've seen, like Versailles and the Medici palace in Florence. Of course, both of those would fit inside with room to spare.

John, on a separate outing from the following pictures (no, we didn't stay until dark and change clothes in the public toilet). On the right is The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

The following are some random pictures from within. As a side note, when I was buying tickets, I am quite sure that I guy tried to pick-pocket me and failed. It is among my major lifetime goals to never get pick-pocketed. I've trudged all over France without the Gypsy rings ever getting me, and I'm trying to keep the streak going. So far, I've never seen any street hustling in China that anywhere approaches the kinds of things I've ever seen in Europe.

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This last item is from a clock museum within the Forbidden City. It contains a huge collection of spectacularly ornate clocks that were gifts of state from the European nations to the Chinese emperors. Some of them are ingeniously elaborate, and include such things as singing birds (the songs produced by slide whistles powered by bellows), dancing figurines, fountains, and a golden elephant that swings its articulated trunk as it marches. A few clockworks are actually demonstrated twice a day, but many of the best ones are at least shown in action in a looping video.
The 18th century English clock above was my favorite. When the hour chimes, the mechanical figure writes a few Chinese characters in calligraphy. The actual action is only shown on the video mentioned above, but even still, it honestly ranks as one of the coolest things I've ever seen in a museum.