After lunch, we headed back outside of town to go to the Summer Palace. First impression… WOW! There are A LOT of people here!!! Seriously—it was like wall to wall people. And like everywhere else in China… so many people were smoking. I was a little overwhelmed at first because of the number of people and the smell of the smoke- which I’m very sensitive too. I decided to keep an open mind and it really did get better. Once we got past the first few stops, it seemed to open up a bit and everyone was allowed to spread out a little bit more.
As I mentioned previously, we attracted quite a bit of attention everywhere we went. People would stop and stare at us. Some non-chalantly, and some just out right staring and not trying to hide it! Here was one part of the day where we weren’t attracting the most stares… a group of monks walked right by us. Everyone stopped what they were doing to stare. Including us, I must admit. It’s not everyday we see a sight like this! It was a really cool thing to experience.
Beautiful temple in the distance.
Boats lined up and overlooking the man made lake. I can’t remember or recall everything we learned about the Summer Palace this day… but you really should look up some of the history about it online. It’s really, really fascinating!!!
So. Many. People.
This was a LONG hallway. It went on FOREVER! All of the paintings were hand painted and each one was different from the others. There were many thousands. It was beautiful.
Close up of one of the paintings.
In between each of the hallways, there was a separate room with more paintings which adjoined the next hallway. Here’s the ceiling in one of the little rooms.
Looking down the next hallway. They were all open air.
Overlooking the water across to the bridge.
Gorgeous temple.
Overlooking the Princess Dowager’s boat.
Boats on the other side of the big Princess’ boat.
Some more gorgeous sights on the way to the exit. The whole property was just breathtakingly beautiful.
No comments:
Post a Comment