Tian'amen Square and the Forbidden City August 11th

And some food..

At the Lama Temple Youth Hostel having a beer after all the picture taking..

I bought a Chinese phrase book.. Trying to study hard...haha

The Chinese hang their clothes to dry in the streets

Looking at all the great pictures that we have taken inside the city..

Outside of the Forbidden City

Entering the Imperial garden in the city

Here they are again

Cute figures on the many of the roofs in the city

Decorative stair

The Forbidden City was huge, never thought it would be that big..

Some great carving (or what should I call it..)

Me and Joraan

Joraan and Sevilla

Me infront of the entrance

One of the entrance to the Forbidden City.

This is the monument of the people's heroes. The construction began in 1952 and was finished in 1958. It was built with more than 17000 pieces of granite and white marble. It is 37.94 meters high, 50.44 meters wide from east to west and 61.54 meters long from north to south. It is the largest such monument in Chinese history.

The second day in Beijing we went to Tian'amen Square and the Forbidden City with a girl we met at the Lama Temple Youth Hostel the day before. She was from Australia and had been studying Chinese for 8 years. So when we got to know that she spoke pretty fluent in Chinese, we just sticked to her as glue...haha. Because when we first arrived China we were so lost. We found out pretty fast that especially taxi drivers are really, really bad in English. Their English skill is like zero. And they always try to rip you off! Blaming on the meter that it's broken or something else. And it is hopeless to discuss with them or try to ask them any kind of questions. They also like to drive you to a completely different place than you were asking for to take you.

Like when we first came to Beijing we were going to take a taxi from the airport to the hostel and asked if he knew where the hostel was, and he said yes. Oh, and we also had the address to the hostel written down in Chinese. It turns out that he drove us to right place, the only thing is that he pointed in the wrong direction. The hostel was kind of hard to see from the main road though. We could not find it, so we asked a couple of people for the direction, but they were all pointing in different directions. So we were walking up and down the main road for some time before we finally found it. Thank god! Tired and exhausted.. We learned that if we are looking for directions we have to at least ask three people before we can be pretty sure the direction is correct. The thing is that the Chinese people is to proud or something to say that they don't know the answere so they just make up something instead, that's what we have been told. Anyways, we have had a lot of different problems with the taxi drivers in China. During our stay in China we got to experience that the language/communication was going to a big problem.

The hostel itself was not really nice. It was dirty especially the showers and the toilets. On the shower walls there were like smashed bugs and the toilets was always clogged with poo! We were actually wondering what the hell are we doing, we are not made for living the life of a backpacker. How were we ever going to survive for 6 whole weeks!?