day 4 - the forbidden city - 20.08

Decided to give another try and go and see the famous Forbidden City. It was closed to the public for 500 years while 2 dynasties of emperors (Ming & Qing) lived in there. It is a huge and best preserved complex of ancient buildings and gardens. They advise you to take a full day to explore it, but we don't have the patience for that :) So we spent there about 3 hours or so, probably looked through close to 60-70% of it and that was plenty for us. Weather was really really warm that day so we used all the chances to go through the inside exhibitions where they had air conditioning. Of course the whole thing was magnificent again, it was nicely renovated and well preserved with all its pretty colors and unbelievable level of details.

There are couple of things that i should mention about the Chinese culture and traditions. It absolutely gives us creeps of how they snort and spit everywhere - on the streets in the restaurants in the stores, soo discusting. We were wondering if we will perhaps get used to that by the end of the trip, but i doubt that, it is soo gross. Another strange thing is that whenever they take photos, they stand there with both of their arms open to the sides and making V with their fingers, so strange. What is the deal with that?

In the afternoon we headed over to eat close to the stadium. I must say that the foods we choose get worse and worse as the time goes by :) This time we ordered chicken dish with vegetables. Well, the chicken was there but there was no chicken meat. It almost seemed that we got everything else that was left from the chicken after the meat was removed. Best of all were chicken toes that we found in there, like the actual toes, just sitting there in our food. Not very appertising :( Riina actually even ate a bit of the toes :) Then there was also some spice there, apparently it was cut in half and it was about the size of a plum, but at first sight i could have sworn that this was a bug :) I hope it really was a spice.