It's Wednesday morning, about 9:00a. I'm out and about and on the way to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

I pass by this tiny little car - at least I think it is a car from behind. It's a Fred Flintstone kind of thing - but it's actually a motorcycle/trike combo. They have a lot of them in Beijing.

And while I'm on the subject, Beijingers' drive like nuts. I thought about getting the camera out yesterday on the three and a half hour drive back from Simatai, but I was tired and figured I'd be long dead before I got a really good picture of a bus barreling into us. If you're on a blind curve anywhere in China and you're driving a bus full of crippled kids, think nothing of driving in the opposite lane and just hope that the oncoming 18-wheeler will get out of your way. Uhhh... NOT. I could not believe the # of near misses we saw yesterday. Plus, sadly, a horrific accident on Monday night on the way to Jinshanling - a minivan (just like the one in which we were riding) had impacted a BIG truck. The front was a pancake, one of the doors was laying by the side of the road, and that explained the police car and passenger car following it that had barreled through a few blinds curves on their own 10 minutes prior to us stumbing upon the accident site.

The ride from Simatai to Beijing yesterday was only about 130 km (figure 80 miles or so), but it took us four hours - at least half of that scooting around Beijing.

Man, oh man, it's going to be crazy hot, crazy traffic, crazy prices for the Olympics in 2008. Speaking of Olympics, I did some brief online searches for hotels next August... I'm paying $80/night this week. Guess how much next August? $1200 per night. No kidding.

DSC_0752

I really really really like taking pictures of stuff without people in the pictures. Impossible in Beijing. Really impossible at the entrance to the Forbidden City.

Tiananmen Square. Interesting factoid - I can't spell "Tiananmen", so I used Google to look up the word. While the Google search results came back with a gazillion hits, I couldn't link to any of the pages... I just got a "Cannot connect to that site message." Maybe I'm paranoid, but I think the descendents of Chairman Mao block stuff from time to time. Go figure.

I drove by here a few days later in a taxi on the way to the Beijing West Train station and they had erected scaffolding all around this entrance. They left Mao's photo uncovered, but everything else was covered up. Guess they're applying a face lift to this before the Olympics.

This place (the outside gate to the Forbidden City) is a *lot* smaller than I would have thought. I've got that fancy new lens that I'm playing with and I think I'm gonna use that a lot on this trip. It makes things look a bit larger than they really are.

Kind of surprising that the iconic sites we've all heard about are smaller than life - the entrance to the Forbidden City, Red Square, etc. Go figure.

Having said that, though, the Forbidden City is *huge*. There are 9,999 rooms (something about 10,000 of them would be a little too in your face...) and you could easily spend a day walking around here. I was here for about four or five hours.

DSC_0764

DSC_0768

DSC_0770

DSC_0772