Forbidden City « Travelin' Chucks

Posts Tagged "Forbidden City"

Holiday Fiasco – Beijing: Word on the Street

China

Names: Maarten & Philippe

Ages: 27 & 25

Hometown: Antwerp, Belgium

Beware of Chinese National Day!!

The Chinese celebrate their National Day with great zeal!!! At this time all 1.6 billion Chinese citizens takes time off of work to head to Beijing to be there for the festivities!! How is this going to affect your time in Beijing you ask?? Well Philippe and Maarten have the answer!!

As you can see by the picture they are blue eyed, blonde haired Europeans. What does this mean in China…celebrities!!! As they were walking around Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City with the other 1.6 billion Chinese they were constantly hounded for pictures!! It came to the point where they stood for ten minutes posing for photos as a “giant mass of Chinese people surrounded us taking photo after photo.” The waves of photo craving Chinese would not have stopped if Philippe and Maarten had not just turned on their heels and booted it away from the crowd and headed to the safer confines of the hutong, the traditional Chinese neighborhoods of Beijing.

Lesson learned: If you are a westerner and heading to Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City Expect to have many photos taken with you. Going to be in the Square near a major holiday??? Might as well avoid it outright!!

Ballin’ in Beijing: Episode Three

China

Celebs

Let’s just get it out there… We feel like celebrities here in Red China. Why you ask?? Because we have people asking to take pictures with us at least twice a day. If they don’t ask they out right just snap a photo in our faces or the oh so famous have their friend stand near us and pretend to be taking a picture of them instead of us. It happens allllll the time!!

While we were snapping away in Tiananmen Sq. a Chinese girl came up to us asking if she could practice English with us. We had heard of scams where Chinese girls come up to you and try and get you to go to a teahouse with them and then charge you some crazy amount for tea so you could say we were on our guard. We decided that as soon as she started asking us for money we would ditch her. Until then we would give her a shot. Come to find out she actually did want to learn some English. It was actually an assignment for school: ask foreigners if you can speak with them for 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes turned into around 2 hours. It was actually quite fun!!

The Forbidden City was really amazing. It is the largest and best-preserved group of ancient buildings in China. Unfortunately, we went on a weekend and it was sooooo crowded, to the point where it kind of took away from the experience. But nonetheless it was beautiful. And like Kinsey said in the episode, it really did feel like you were in Mulan, like stepping back in time.