First thing we did that morning (and I was the first stop so I had to be ready at 6:30 am) was visit the forbidden city. It was really cool to see the comparison to the movie “the last emporer” and to imagine what happened in the palace. It was enormous, my pictures don’t even do it justice for showing how big the palace was for one person and his family. Then again one emporer did have 3000 wives at one point to house so it makes sense. The actual living spaces were not open to the public and we could only observe from the outside.

After that we ended up visiting a medical centre because China is famous for their medicine. I didn’t know this was included but we got a foot massage, which was really good especially with all the walking I had been doing.

We got to visit a pearl shop which also gave us a little introduction about pearls. I had no idea that clams could grow like multiple pearls in one and that the amount of lines on the shell tells us how old it is(just like a tree each line represents a year). We got lunch afterwards which was just as good as the day before.

We went to the “Temple of Heaven”. The architecture and history was very interesting but they didn’t have much english written in for translation. I really enjoyed the art there the most.

Lastly we got to visit the summer palace which was for the emporers use and he actually got it built as a birthday present for his mom. The scenery there was beautiful. They had pathways all around a lake and a bridge to their own island that they could pray at. The summer palace had a huge building across the lake so it was a little hard to see.