After waking up relatively early and running some errands, I walked over to Tienamen Square to people watch, do a little writing, and to rest up for my big adventure: biking to the Summer Palace outside of Beijing. Once in the square, however, I was approached by no fewer than 20 people selling postcards, maps, or Mao watches, and while my cold shoulder repelled most of them a couple sat next to me for a while and asked me a lot of questions about America and how much I'd be willing to pay for some postcards.
Deciding I would never have any peace, I rented a bike (brakes cost extra, apparantly) and started my epic-length journey to the Summer Palace, about 8 miles from the city center. The Lonely Planet book said the trip should take 1.5 - 2 hours, but apparantly they've never tried to make the trip using their own map. So with getting lost, traffic, and having to follow the grid of streets instead of the crow's path, the trip took about 3 hours and I'm guessing about 10 miles. Arriving at the Summer Palace this way is quite rewarding, though, and to anyone with a day to spare and in halfway decent shape, I recommend this trip highly.
I had envisioned a retreat of pristine serenity, worthy of the emperors of ancient China, where I could rest my bike weary legs under a shade tree, have Zhang Ziyi feed me grapes, and get caught up on some writing. Instead I found a sea of tour groups and locals all trying to find their own little patch of serenity and photo ops. I'm sure mass chaos and aggrivation isn't what the designers had in mind, but it's what they got! And that's what I get for going on a Saturday.
The Summer Palace is situated stunningly on a lake, with a large hill at one end. On top of the hill is a Buddhist shrine and a pre-Olympics construction site. Since most of the tour group activities were taking place around the lake, I was able to escape most of the crowd atop the hill and around some rocky corners, but every time I stopped long enough to relax, some German tourists would undoubtedly file past, just as thrilled, I'm sure, to see me as I was to see them.
If you've ever had ants or pests in your apartment, you know the feeling on triumph when your strict regimine of eradication and cleanliness seems to have beeten the bugs and won you a solid stretch of pest free time, and then that feeling of complete exhaspiration when one clambers over your toast. This is the Summer Palace on a Saturday.
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