Sarah's Bootcamp Day 1

Feb 15, 2015

Let me just start by saying, if you haven't had a personal masseuse come to your hotel room and then ate chocolate and drank wine and you aren't jealous of us right now, you are crazy. But I'll get there in a minute.

Today was our 1st day of "Sarah's Bootcamp" which started with 3hrs walking through Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City. Before heading out we grabbed breakfast at our hotel and while April stayed on the "safer" side with more American foods, I ventured out with dumplings, bean sprouts and eggs. It was a cool day in the 50's but with a strong breeze. After hearing so much about Beijing's air quality I was curious to see what our 1st full day in the city held for our lungs. I didn't really "feel" the poor quality, but the whole day had a strong haze almost that of a cloudy rainy day with out the rain.

Tienanmen Square is the political center of the city center. It's a very culturally significant site for the people of China and is usually very crowded with it's ability to hold 1million people, luckily on a Sunday in February it wasn't. Most of the square is blocked off to tourists and didn't have much to see, relatively speaking. Out guide let us know that people come of the square to take 2 pictures, one in front of the Forbidden City's portrait of Chairman Mao, and the other with the white tourists! She warned us that they would approach us for a picture or just grab us and snap away. Good thing that she gave us the heads up, but we were CELEBRITIES!! It was really cute when people would timidly approach us and were so tickled when we agreed to take a few pics with them. Sometimes the whole family would join in one at a time!

After freezing our little under-prepared American butts off we journeyed into the Forbidden City. Completed in 1420, the city was named because it was off-limits to the common person. The compound has 9,999 rooms, one less than God's temple in heaven and also because 9 is a heavenly and lucky number in Chinese. The emperor who built it required 6 levels of brick flooring to prevent underground intruders. The temples were beautifully decorated with gold gilded dragons (a masculine symbol) and Chinese characters. There were also small sculptures of phoenix (a feminine symbol) and lions, always in odd numbers. Most of the art depicted the emperor's control over the world with more dragons and spheres, symbolizing the world. Before reaching the South Gate's exit we entered the Imperial Garden. The garden had many limestone rock structures highlighting the beauty of natural erosion and 300 or 500 year old Juniper trees, gnarled and stripped. The mote through the City had money floating on the surface because of and old "fortune telling" superstition. If the money floated, it was bad luck; if the money sank, it was good luck.

The rest of the afternoon the other 17 people in our tour went on an optional tour of old Beijing. April and I wanted the day to explore the city, and we definitely got a real view of life in Beijing. We came back to our hotel, ate a Thai lunch, put on warmer clothes, and went to the Beijing zoo via taxi. Not maybe people outside of our tourist bubble speak English, so we had to get things written down before venturing out. The zoo ticket was 10RMB which is less than $2. I have to say, compared to the other international zoos, I was kind of disappointed. While there was a decent diversity of the zoo's collection, enclosures and signage were subpar. A lot of animals were not out and things just seemed kind of unclean for the animals. I was also pretty appalled that it was common practice for visitors to feed the animals despite signage against the action. After an hour of perusing the critters, we attempted to get a taxi. Unfortunately this proved more difficult than we expected. We flagged down 3-4 cabs that either opted to pick up the locals instead of us, or refused to take us back to our hotel. FINALLY we grabbed a taxi who was willing to drive us back to the CBD. Traffic was BAD. It took us an hour to get home while it had only take us 30-40mins to get to the zoo.

Back to the hotel around 6:30, and we were wiped. A light dinner at the hotel was the perfect fix due to our big/late lunch. April was feeling a little under the weather due to the stop and go taxi ride, so she had spaghetti for dinner and I had a beef broth and noodle soup. So far the noodles and dumplings haven't bothered my stomach, which just supports the foreign "non gluten filled" breads theory. We quickly showered and our personal masseuses came over. Our tour company arranged a GREAT massage deal; 180RMB for a 1 hour massage. The ladies were very sweet and naturally it was a super relaxing experience.

A few bites of chocolate and glasses of wine and now we are off to bed. Tomorrow we visit a jade shop and I think there's this old wall we'll be seeing…or something like that.