Hot, hot, hot and windy!

The summer palace is another place I visited and enjoyed, but never got around to posting about because I feel like I need to treat you to a lengthy essay on the history of the place, but although I foolishly purchased an audio guide, it was next to worthless, as it was supposed to tell from GPS where I was, and it didn’t. It also kept turning off, and when it did talk, it invariably repeated the same thing I heard at the very beginning and got deep into Buddhist philosophy in a poor English translation, and I got nothing out of it, even when it repeated itself. So, here’s the history of the summer palace: The emperor and family used to live there in the summer. The end. You can probably find a nice Wikipedia article on it to fill in the gaps. Maybe I should find that Wikipedia article so I know what I saw…

Here’s what I thought- it was a lovely setting, and lots of climbing: stairs, clambering up rocks, climbing hills, etc. The palace was beautiful and fun to see where people lived. There was one building where the empress lived that was furnished in the way she had it when she lived there, and it was amazing, but we didn’t actually get to go in, but could look at it through very dusty windows.

The interesting part of the excursion was that the summer palace was supposed to close at 6. At about 5:00, the clouds rolled in, and there was a lovely breeze coming from across the lake. At about 5:15, that nice breeze turned into a brisk and lively wind. At that point, they closed the doors to everything that didn’t lead out, closed all the little shops, including the place where I had to return my audio guide to get my deposit back (!) and shut down everything abruptly 40 minutes early. I wanted my 100 yuan deposit back, and really didn’t want my useless audio guide, but couldn’t find anyone to help me turn it in, since the kiosk had closed. I finally found a Chinese lady who was trying to do the same thing, and just followed her. By bullying any number of people, she found a kiosk that was closed, but still had a person in it, and made them take it back, so all was well, and it turned out to be a lovely adventure, if a bit quickly terminated.

I also took advantage of the bad weather to ride in this little bike rickshaw back to the subway station!