The Summer Palace

The summer palace is an imperial lake retreat, which used to be linked to the forbidden city by a private canal, so that the emperor could commute from one to the other according to weather and whim. It is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. I spent two hours walking around the lake with my lower jaw hanging in the vicinity of my navel. Everywhere I looked there were gracile pagodas, delicate bridges and tranquil meadows, and I wonder why the emperor ever bothered to come back to the forbidden city.

In one of the numerous halls we saw a quick presentation of Chinese theater, apparently a combination of martial arts and interpretive dance. I can now appreciate where Darth Maul got all his cool moves, but on the other hand I can confidently say that the twelve minute show is not a second too short.

We didn't remember that we had something else planned until mid-afternoon, and had to race across town to get to the temple of heaven, a huge city park centered on a round building with a three-tiered roof of deep sapphire. We came too late to see it up close, but it was clearly round, very big, and extremely cold, so we headed to the Hyatt in Wang Fu Jin for a warm coffee and a little rest.

Besides the great wall and the forbidden city, the most unmissable experience in Beijing has to be eating Peking Duck. We had ours in Da Dong, a swanky restaurant on the fifth floor of an upscale mall near Wang Fu Jin street. The menu was 147 pages long and had plenty of ridiculously fancy food, including abalone dishes costing thousands of Yuan. We ordered just about everything reasonably priced, including a sea cucumber appetizer. The sea cucumber is not a vegetable but a most improbable marine animal, a kind of giant sea slug that spends its whole life lying on the sea bed doing nothing. Once cooked it has the consistency of jell-o and looks like an oily turd, but in China it's considered a delicacy. It took me a lot of courage to taste it, but it really was delicious in its caramelized onion sauce, and a great start for an awesome meal. Score one for Chinese cuisine.