Our second full day in China (Jan. 11) found us doing more heavy tourist activities. The first pic is the view from our hotel and the second is one showing both lots of construction and some of the rickshaw-type traffic in the city. We saw all sorts of wheeled vehicles in China. We first visited Tiananmen Square. We had to run our backbacks through an X-ray machine to enter the square. It was cold and windy and there was about an inch of hard packed snow on the ground. Since we were exposed to the elements we did not spend much time in square but rather moved north into the Forbidden City - the Imperial Palace complex. The last emperor died decades ago, so the city is now a big museum. There is symbolism everywhere (more than I have time to describe), from colors of the walls to the knobs on the doors to the statues on the rooftops. The lion statues guarded many doorways throughout China. Usually there were male and female lions paired on either side of the doorway. The male usually holds a ball representing the world; the female holds a lion cub. In the last pictures we see one of the emperor's thrones, and one of the empress's beds - note the dragon (symbol of the emperor) and phoenix (symbol of the empress).
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