Tiananmen and The forbidden city

Long time, no see! Again, it has been a while since I last updated my blog and I'm sorry for that. So much has happen since the last time, but I haven't had the time to update the blog due to exams and way to much homework. So I'm going to make it up to you - I'm going to write a looong post starting with The forbidden City!


Group shot.
We went to Tiananmen square and The forbidden city sunday some weeks ago. Half the class was hung over, so had lots of space in the bus. We also had a very talented guide who spoke both English and Chinese to us, so we could learn the the history both in Chinese and English (I, however, don't remember anything). There was taken a lot of pictures on Tiananmen - not only by us but also of us. Everytime we stopped to listen to our guide, at least 20 Chinese stopped to look at us and take pictures of us. This, of course, irritated the guide, but I couldn't care less and smiled and let them take pictures. After being taken pictures of abou ten thousand times we went on into The forbidden city. First we entered the Tiananmen gate (the one with the big picture of Mao). Then we had to wait for one of the helpers to buy the tickets and meanwhile the street vendors ran up to us and tried to sell us overpriced stuff and more people came over to take pictures of us.

After an eternity the helper came with the tickets and we enered through a side entrance. About five minutes into the guided tour a very distressed lady came up to us - she had lost her husband, group and guide and wandered of to look for them. The distressed lady was so distressed she stopped speaking English after a few words and started to speak German. Luckily Luna and I understand and speak some, so helped her and we decided I could help her find the paging service so we could find her group. I didn't take to long after arriving at the paging service a very distressed (and angry) husband and guide came and found us. They we're very happy I helped here and spoke some more German to me. By that time I started to become very language confuced (Norwegian, English, Chinese and German in one day is to much for my brain!), so I replied to them in a mix between Chinese and English.

I'm trying to blend in... And fail!
After the happy reunion, I returned to my gruop, learn that I didn't miss anything important in the history lesson, took some more pictures and we exited The forbidden city. The day was really warm so when we found our air conditioned bus we were all happy. Later I found out the bus was too cold and I got a cold. Hurray!