Our first stop was Tienanmen Square. This is the entrance gate into the Forbidden City and has a lot of cultural significant. I loved the Forbidden City! I kept picturing Mulan scaling the walls to save the emperor. The Forbidden City is huge and made up of a bunch of different buildings. I had no idea how big it was, it took a good 2 hours to walk through. Our tour guide told us lots of interesting facts about the various emperors and royal families. Apparently one of the emperors was so paranoid about being murdered that he had the top floor of his sleeping quarters made up into 9 different identical bedrooms. He would randomly sleep in a different bedroom every night so one one knew exactly where he was sleeping. The emperor believed he was the son of heaven and that belief was very apparent in the layout, order, and overall feeling of the Forbidden City.
Then we drove about an hour and half to the Great Wall. Unfortunately by that time it was late in the afternoon and 100 degrees but we were still excited. Blake randomly got a really bad headache RIGHT as we arrived at the Wall. The Great Wall is so huge and steep, pictures do not do it justice. You have to climb over huge large steps to reach different look out towers.
Blake and I started the climb but Blake quickly started feeling worse and worse. When he felt like he was going to throw up/pass out, we took a break. We sat down right in the middle of the staircase to let people hold onto the railings to go up/down. Then this random Chinese lady came and sat next to Blake. I figured she was just taking a break too but then she put her arm around Blake and started smiling for her friend taking pictures a few steps below. I was so confused...this was not really a picture worthy moment with Blake hunched over with his head in his lap. Blake perked up and started smiling when he realized what she was doing. We started laughing and smiled with her for a bunch of pictures. She was super nice spoke to us for a few minutes in Chinese then started climbing up the Wall.
Blake and I laughed about how random and weird that was when another group stopped us for a picture. This time it was 3-5 women. Blake's headache had mostly gone away by this point. Clearly the man loves a good audience. So we snapped some more pictures and made our way up to the first resting point/look out. When we got to the look out, over 10 groups of people just grabbed our hands, linked arms or put their arms around us and just started snapping pictures. People then started busting out their selfie sticks and the party really got started. We were there for over 10 minutes taking pictures with people. It was so fun, random and bizarre! I didn't get a ton of pictures because we busy being in the pictures. This guy below loved Blake and posed like that for a good 2 minutes.
At the second lookout point, the same groups of people wanted to take our picture again! They brought new friends and did some different poses. Everyone was so nice and smiled at us a lot. A lot of women pointed to my teeth and smiled and nodded repeatedly. So I'll take that as a compliment? It was the same story climbing down the Wall, different groups either blatantly taking pictures of us or just grabbing us to take with pictures with them. It was all very flattering. I basically know what Beyonce feels like.
China doesn't have Facebook but has something very similar called Renren. I bet Blake and I are FAMOUS on Renren. Someone look into that for us. #chinesecelebrities #chinesebeyonce #chinesejayz
We were beat by the end of the day but a fantastic day touring such a cool city! Then it was back home to America in the morning.
