Forbidden City

Mao, ever watching Water pot for extinguishing fires Carved rocks Our lunch

Just like every other place from the times of the emperors the Forbidden City is ginormous. When you come up to the outer wall the first thing you see is Chairmen Mao's portrait hanging on the wall (Talk about a wart on the Mona Lisa? Oh yea and Mao had a wart on his chin.) Once I got in I was blown away at how vast the compound is, how many buildings there were, and how many walls there are. I didn't really notice until our guide said it, but there are no trees inside the inner walls. That was so there was no place for assassins to hide. Another way they kept the emperor secure was for him to have 40 bedrooms for himself! How is that secure? Every night he would choose one of his bedrooms at random and not tell anybody. In that day the emperor slept alone, without his empress or his many concubines.     Earlier I mentioned that the Forbidden city was enormous, now add to that extravagant. Everything was over the top, but still beautiful (must be the ying yang thing). All of the ceilings had extremely detailed designs repeated over and over. Many of them depicted dragons facing phoenixes, because of ying and yang, to keep a balance. Also something I found funny were that there were metal balls hanging from the center of every ceiling. There were there so that if someone other than the emperor tried to sit in the chair it would fall on them. Other than living quarters the majority of the buildings were temples for worshiping the various gods, and between some of the temples there were 'resting buildings' for the emperor to rest while walking between buildings.     After the Forbidden City we went to this local restaurant for lunch where we had: pineapple deep fried chicken, tofu and egg in beef sauce, three mushroom surprise, and fried rice. Surprisingly the fried rice was very much like the fried rice in the United States.      The second to last picture is a bunch of rocks and carved stones held together by ancient glue made by egg whites and sticky rice, and here it has stood for hundreds of years.