The Bering, Beijing and beyond.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

The Bering, Beijing and beyond.

It is 3:30 am, on the morning of my. Sixth day in China, and I am just getting around to my first blog!  There is a good reason for my tardiness.  I've been using all my stamina to just keep up the pace.  I'm not alone, of course.  The sudden addition of thirteen hours to the beginning your day tends to be a little disorienting to one's circadian rhythms.  Breakfast conversation tends to begin with "How much sleep did you get last night?"  And things of that sort.  It's getting better!  Tonight I slept straight through from 8:30 to 3:15, a vast improvement from my first night in Beijing.

The morning of September 1, at 5;00 am, having had a restless night in anticipation of the start of my journey.  I started for O'hare at 7:00 am, exactly as planned, and arrived at the airport a little before 9:00.  I zipped through security and was left with a three hour wait before take off.  The United 747 took off exactly on time, and I spent the next thirteen and one half hours eating, reading or trying to sleep.  There was nothing worth watching on the plane's movies (mostly things I'd avoided at the theatre) and sleep, as usual was hopeless, so I arrived in Beijing Capitol Airport at 3:30 pm, the day after I left, twenty hours more or less after wake-up.  But, it was still only 3:30 pm in Beijing.  There was still more on the agenda!  Fetch luggage, go through customs, find tour leader and fellow travelers, make way to the hotel, register, find room, meet for dinner (in the hotel, thankfully) and crash into bed at 7:30, only to be exhausted but wide awake at 12:30 am!  Circadian rhythms,  bah, humbug!

So, that was day 1 and 2.  On day 3, the tour began in earnest, with a tour of the Temple of Heaven complex, which is an enormous public park, as well as a stunningly beautiful remnant of the days of Imperial China.  The entire complex consists of not only the Temple of Heaven, but other buildings and pavilions also used in that as gathering places, sacrificial sites, and even places for the Emperor to change his clothes.  The size, complexity, and engineering of the place is astounding.  Mostly built over 500 years ago, without modern equipment or technology, it is unimaginably awesome, in the really sense of that word.d. Awe is what it was meant to inspire, and it is still doing it's job 500+ years later.

I'm also going to include a picture of me, trying out the exercise equipment at the Temple of Heaven site.

With my mind still trying to assimilate the Temple of Heaven and its surround, our next stop proved to be even more mind-blowing.  The Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City is the larges place complex in the world.  It was the "city" residence of the Emperor and his immediate family and "accociates," wives, children, concubines, eunuchs, pets, etc.  The Chinese Imperium did not create spaces such as the castles one sees in Europe.  Rather, it used a series of very impressing public spaces, and a whole lot of private places.  When one hears a statement like the emperor being sequestered in the Forbidden City, it turns out to be a rather apt discription.  There are stunningly beautiful reception halls, dining halls, audience halls, but the living space are all surprisingly human in their purporsions, rather like the living arrangements of ordinary Chinese people, rooms around a central courtyard.  Of course, all this comes with priceless furnishings and decoration, statuary and landscaping, befitting an absolute feudal potentate.  I'll include one picture, and I have many, many more, but you can probably get a better idea of the Forbidden City, form watching the fairly recent movie, "The Last Emperor."  It shows not only great shots of the Forbidden City, by offers some idea of how it played into the needs of an aging imperial state.

The day came to an end with a dinner out, featuring Peking Duck, what else.  I crashed into bed at 8:00 that night, and slept all the way 'till 1:00!  So you see, 3:15 is really pretty good.

I'm going to post this as is.  I have much more to write, but I never know what the WiFi can handle as far as bits and pixels and all that stuff.  More, later.