the•truth•shall•set•you•free

ok, continuing from where we left off the previous post..

although you cant really see from this pic that we are at tiananmen square, we really were there. its a really enormous parade square that was made famous in that pic of a man blocking a squad of tanks by standing in their way during the infamous 1989 tiananmen square protests.









here, another pic of tiananmen square (can see more of it here). i juz dunno why i put on that face. guess i was trying to look tall. besides the tiananmen, we obviously went to the forbidden city as well. its a palace that occupies alot of land space - took us a whole morn juz to walk ard w/o entering the different palaces, not that we were allowed in anyway. due to the impending beijing olympics in 2008, many of the places we went were under renovation, likewise the forbidden city. when we were there, it reminded me of the previous time i went there - how my friend and i sneaked out w/o our teacher's permission and took a cab to the forbidden city to feast upon its magnificence under the stars. she waz like a stunning beauty shrouded in mystery, with thousands of unique stories behind her to tell. i was telling my students to imagine how the pple inside the palace lived during their times - having to spend a large part of their lives there, not knowing anything else beyond the palace walls, not that they would be intd anyway - the palace was so big that they could probably spend their whole lives exploring it. a must-go!


p/s: i din bring any camera, save for my hp's, and i haven received some pix from my students, so i dun have any for forbidden city. sad.
of the many things to get accustomed to in beijing, besides the dry and dusty weather and the mad traffic with traffic lights that pple dun follow, food and toilet were 2 other important elements we had to grapple with. food-wise, much of it was salty and oily and veggy. the meal on the left was by far the best meal i had in beijing, even betta than the peking duck one. (from left, clockwise) corn nibblets (like those from kenny rogers), kong ba (fatty meat), some soup (their soups* were usu the worst course), some veg, steamed egg (like those from sakae sushi), empty bao (they call them man tou), and rice (in the centre).


*: during one of the meals, we actually played 终极密码, where each of us ard the table had to guess a number that one of us had thought of. the person who guessed it had to eat something. you had to see the look of agony on nicholas' face when he was forced to drink the soup. in the end, he forced me to drink it too lor..

while i was in china in 1996, i had the honour of visting a toilet. the urinal wasnt like those you see in s'pore toilets - on its own. it was a long drain of many urinals combined together - it was like peeing into a drain. when you flush, it was a huge gush of water threatening to flood the 'urinal' and dethrone its banks. the sound of it? thunderous. anyhow, we met quite a couple of nasty toilets on our trip there this time round. sometimes it was the stench that kills, sometimes it was the (lack of) cleanliness that irks, but we did manage to find good ones, like the 4-star toilet on the left. worthy mention: the toilet at the peking duck place was modern and clean and stylo too.