Day 3: Forbidden City

Sorry for no pictures, but the WiFi here is so bad that it takes an hour just to make a post from a draft.

Whatever

Today (Day 3 in Beijing) our plan was to visit the Forbidden City, Lama Temple, and the Olympic Village.

We only managed to visit the Forbidden City 😂😂😂

This place is so crowded that you constantly have elbows in your ribs. And the Chinese people are always in a hurry, trying to see everything in one second. We were overwhelmed for a while 😂😂 but for once we were not the only foreigners 🤙🏽🤙🏽😂

The Forbidden City is huge, with lots of narrow paths, but it's really worth seeing despite the crowds. Admission costs 60 Yuan (around €6), so it's really cheap compared to Germany 😂

Thanks to tourism, we were finally able to get a real coffee there 👍🏽😂

When we left the city at 2 p.m., we were right on schedule.

Until a Chinese lady approached us and called us beautiful 😌😌😂

Fang is 32 years old, studied English, and is currently in Beijing for 5 days. We then went for coffee with her, which turned into tea and two glasses of wine 🍷 (it tastes like dish soap😷).

But she was really friendly, answered all our questions about the culture, and asked us a lot about Europe too.

Now we also understand why everyone here stares at us:

Chinese people spend a lot of money on plastic surgery to look like Europeans. So they have sharper noses than Asians, bigger eyes, and a more narrow jawline. So we'll just take it as a compliment 😌

Well, by then it was too late to continue with the rest of our plan (attractions close here at 4-4:30 p.m.).

Red is the color for joy and happiness here.

Even when a taxi is available, the sign is red (of course, we thought it would be the opposite way around🤦🏽‍♀️ well, we're just farmers in another country...🚜)

When making new acquaintances, you drink wine here (which is probably why we had to drink as well, poor us...).

New insight: Chinese people use plastic for everything, no matter what. But there is no trash on the ground anywhere, truly nowhere. In this aspect, Germans could really learn something. And here, nobody vandalizes anything or deliberately damages things. The subway stations are better maintained than the library in Stuttgart 🤦🏽‍♀️

We still haven't gotten used to the sounds...😡