The Forbidden City

The Forbidden city seems to have outgrown its name. The place is crawling with tourists and vendors. Walking throught the complex from north to south was a fluctuating feeling of complete ignorance, frustration and awe. I was trying to imagine a thousand years past, who would be stepping over these tall thresholds. What hands carved painstaking detail into hundreds of tons of solid stone? Then I would just keep walking, past ancient relics made possible by an ancient emperors reign over countless human lives. The gravity is a bit hard to experience with the buzz of a thousand tourists at your back.

Before leaving the city, Brooke and I tucked through a side gate and around a corner where we found a little quiet respite. We were in dire need of a snack but took a few minutes to sketch our surroundings.
The afternoon was comprised of first finding a restauraunt for some lunch. What we found had no english menu, but at least there were pictures...
Note the chinese characters below each of these two dishes, and imagine that you are at a restaurant starving for lunch, speak little to no Chinese, and your waiter speaks zero english. Now imagine that you order the one on the right but get served the one on the left. The "meat" is more skin and fat on cartilage and tendon than it is meat. So you send it back and demand the one that you ordered. It takes five minutes to explain this with hand gestures but finally you succeed. The new dish is much more palatable but still completely unidentifiable.It turns out, when you show these pictures to a translator that you first ate duck tongue and followed it up, convincingly, with duck heart! Welcome to Beijing.