Friday, June 8th-Exploring Forbidden City and such

• Just barely got on my bus
• I got to the Beijing West train station and I pulled out my handy dandy notebook to actually figure out where my hostel was, and it said that a taxi fare would cost 120 RMB from Beijing West which is absolutely ridiculous
• Well the subway is right there in the train station so I thought I could take that
• Turns out I got on the one freaking train line in Beijing that doesn’t connect to any major subway line in Beijing, it just goes out of Beijing instead of going in 
• I figured this out after I bought the 2 RMB subway card, got on the subway, looked at the subway map and panicked
• I went in and out of the subway car twice just to make sure so there goes another instance of me looking like a dumb foreigner
• Then I thought, “Alright, I’ll just catch the bus”
• Beijing West has about 5 terminals where buses go out and I thought I got in the right one but when I walked up the stairs I realized the one that I needed was separated by 2 metal barriers
• The worst part was that I had 60 seconds to hop across the metallic barriers to get to my bus
• I whipped my luggage across the first barrier praying I didn’t break anything, then I whipped it across the second one and got on the bus with about 10 seconds to spare (I’m not that athletic)
• Never get a hostel located in a hutong
• What should have been a 15 minute walk getting from the bus stop to the hostel turned into a 45 minute odyssey
• It’s my fault for not printing out a full-size map of the area with every hutong labeled, but imagine trying to find a tucked-away hostel in a narrow alley and imagine that on each side of the road there’s 10 alleys that you have to go up in order to see if your hostel is there
• I got lost twice trying to find this place
• I thought it was funny that In any other city I travelled in so far, someone would have probably came up to me and tried to help me but here they must be so sick of dumb white people getting lost that they just gave up on me
• The second time I got lost was actually the time I wanted to check-in
• I got there way before check-in time the first time I got there so I dropped off my luggage to go see the Forbidden City
• When I came back at 3 pm (after leaving Jingshan Park at 2 pm for what should have been a 15 minute walk but I got lost) I asked where my luggage was and she said, “Yeah, we threw it out because we thought you weren’t coming”
• They didn’t but for a split second I believed them
• This is the greatest way to take an involuntary hutong tour
• Some people charge 100 RMB to take a hutong tour but if you book a hostel in a hutong and get lost then hey, you got a complimentary hutong tour with a lot of Chinese people giving you the stink eye
• Forbidden City
• That was awesome!!!

• • It was great to see all the Chinese architecture and to get such a good workout walking around a hot day and fighting for the good part of the Beijing air with so many other tourists
• So many cool clocks
• The hall of clocks was really extraordinary
• I thought it was funny that if you give someone a clock as a gift in China they take offense to it because the Chinese word for clock is very similar to the Chinese word for death so here’s this guy getting all of these clocks so he must not have been really popular among the guys
• Plus if someone gives you so many clocks as gifts, usually that’s a sign that, “Hey, it’s time to change the character flaws of your punctuality”
• The clocks were so pretty

• Pimp Chair
• In my future house, I want my lazy boy to look like this

• Take that Derby Hat
• I saw this and I thought about how awesome would this be for a woman to wear this to the Kentucky Derby

• Trying to find well where someone was thrown down
• In the Forbidden City there’s this famous well where a concubine was thrown down and I tried so hard to find it
• I probably spent a good hour looking at my lonely planet map trying to find a free way to see it not really because I love morbid things but just because it’s kind of like that feeling you get when watching a horror movie where you know the girl is going to die and you just want it to be done with but it takes sooooo long and you’re like, “JUST KILL THE WOMAN MR. SERIAL KILLER!”
• That woman was tiny
• She somehow drowned in this well but she must have had a 24 in. waist because no American girl could fit in that hole

• Jingashan Park
• Now that was actually a pretty cool park too and for only 2 RMB it was well worth it

• Pretty Good Chinese Food
• I had some Kung Pao chicken and the chicken was fantastic plus I got about 900% of my daily value of manganese from all of the zucchini

• The lady almost ripped me off because I ordered the 12 RMB version but she gave me the 20 RMB without telling me and she added rice so she wanted to charge me 24 RMB but after I said I wanted the 12 RMB version (after of course eating the 20 RMB version) she went down to 20 RMB
• Then I had the obligatory Mapo Tofu for dinner after a 3 hour nap and that was really good

• You know you have a bad bathroom when
• When you see this sign in front of a bathroom, it really makes you want to wait for another one

• Plus I love the English for this sign

• Tiananmen Square
• Couldn’t get in
• I guess after they take down the Chinese flag for the night they don’t want anyone to come in
• It’s not like I’m going to go in there with a “Free Tibet” t-shirt or anything so yeah it’s a public square but I guess it’s just not that “public”

• Plus I definitely wouldn’t go in and try something funny with the “Big Brother Is Watching You” cameras all over the place
• Guy peeing in public
• So I was walking back from my disappointment and there was this guy peeing in a bush but I saw two or three security guards coming both ways on the street and I know they saw him because they looked at him so I grabbed my camera because I thought I was about to witness some police brutality Chinese-style
• But nope, the security guards and uniformed police just walked right past the guy like it was no big deal
• So then I felt awkward because I grabbed my camera super-excited while looking back and forth from my bag to the security guards and the guy peeing so now people probably think I’m a pervert-whoopee