Oct 2 Friday, Capital Museum (Slides added)

We are still waking up before dawn. Luckily, they start serving breakfast early. This hotel/guest house only does Chinese buffet breakfasts. We are having no trouble eating our 5 servings of vegetables a day, as they have at least 4 kinds at breakfast.

Today's offering included a steamed savory custard and steamed bun. Sometimes they have scrambled eggs sometimes fried on the steam table. (It is really hard to eat a fried egg with chop sticks. It is a good thing that they cook them to the really firm stage.


After breakfast we walked out to the Metro station (a light rail at this point.) We managed to buy 2 multi use cards. There is a deposit of 20 RMB and 30 for travel. Each trip costs 2. When we leave we can turn our card back in and they will give us back our deposit. We were a little worried about this transaction because it seems to always be crowded and then we are a problem. But the clerk spoke English enough to understand what we wanted and tell us what we owed. (It helps that the display is right there too.

Metros work pretty much the same the world over. You pay in some way at a turnstile and look for the end station on the line in the direction you want to go. All of these stations have all of the important stuff in English. On the train, there are recordings in both Chinese and English about the next stop and connecting lines etc. They are actually understandable!

We had to change at the one where you have to walk the longest. There were containment paths to keep people in some sort of line. This is helping overcome the Chinese scrumming tendencies.


We went to the Capital Museum. They are having a special exhibit of the Chinese treasures of the last 5000 years. They borrowed lots of special stuff from all of the museums. (Some of which we had seen in those museums.) The exhibit closes on the 7th, so we have to get this one in early. We wanted to get their when it opened because we had been told that there were long lines, and it was crowded.

The building was opened in 2005 and is really interesting.

That bump coming out is really a tube running at a slant through the building. It has floors of permanent exhibits running through it and a circular ramp that lets you go from floor to floor.


At the top, the slant gets really noticable.
The museum opened just as we got there so the outside line moved really fast. I hopped onto a short line to buy the tickets for the special exhibit and then we discovered that the line for that went downstairs and around the bamboo grove. (Shades of the Elysee Palace) It moved quite quickly. We had time to buy a bottle of water and drink most of it while moving pretty steadily and then we were in. Special exhibits are always really crowded but this was really intense because the Chinese don't need the same personal space. There were a lot of young people there. The approved method of viewing seemed to be take a picture and then look at the picture. Flash was not allowed - but I saw a lot of flashes. I also saw one girl scolded by the guard.

I did take one little movie of an elephant for Calder:




After being so familiar with half of Beijing, we needed a tea break. There was a lovely "tea house" in the museum. This is the menu. (They also had a table with the choices so you could see them and a card in English.)

They served the flower tea in glasses and came and refilled them as many times as you wanted.

We went back to exploring the things we were interested in. Chuck really likes the bronzes and I like the jade. We didn't bother with the calligraphy and just walked through the scroll paintings.

Then it was time for lunch. They had a nice area with a buffet. One interesting thing about buffets is that you think that something looks familiar and then you find out that it is really different. The mac and cheese looking thing had a ginger flavor.

After lunch we took the metro to Prince Gong's Mansion and garden. It was a hike from the metro station, but since we were really just out and about exploring, that didn't matter.

I always take pictures of brides:

This was a different traffic jam. EVERYONE IS OUT HOLIDAYING AND VISITING THE GARDENS!!

I have little cards that have places in Beijing written in both Chinese and English. This was really helpful on this walk. I could just show the card and be pointed in the correct direction.

When we arrived we realized that it really looked familiar - we had been here before and had had a private tour of the garden and dinner in a special restaurant. Oh, well, since it was really crowded we didn't stay long.

We had a long hike out to a road that had taxis but had no trouble flagging one down and wearily went home.

We ate in the Hotel's dining room and were pleased to find that it was really good with lots and lots of choices. We may be eating here a lot.

We had eel with 40 cloves of garlic.

Asparagus
lamb. This seemed to be roasted and then battered with a spicy batter and deep fried. They had two kinds of dipping things - wet and dry spices. Really tasty - but let's face it, anything deep fried is tasty.

We were in bed by 9.

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