Beijing

In this post, I'll write about everything Beijing except the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China. Those two things must have their own post since they were so amazing!!

The day we flew into Beijing we went directly to the Summer Palace. Since it is a palace you can guess that the emperor came here - and they did! During the hot summer months. The lake is manmade and the dirt that they dug out to make the lake? Yeah, it went to make the hill that the palace is built on. We mostly just walked around the grounds, which were packed with tourists! And here we had some more photo shoots where some Chinese tourists wanted their pictures taken with some white westerners. Ha!

Friday was the Forbidden City and Saturday was the Great Wall of China.

Sunday, we went to church. Although I only went for an hour because I ended up getting so sick! With a cold. Church was in an office building where they rent space. They had the full three-hour block and the two Beijing branches were combined since apparently a lot of people leave for the summer. So it started at 8:30 am. Again, this branch's members were only foreign passport holders since Chinese Nationals who are members of the church cannot go to church meetings ... at all. After church, I went back to the hotel to crash and lay in bed all day.

On Monday we had a fascinating meeting with the US Embassy and a few of their personnel. We set up the appointment through one embassy employee who is a member of the church and he invited three other employees to come visit with us. We were there for one and a half hours. Here is a recap of some of the stuff that we learned on our visit:

• The Chinese military helps to "guard" the perimeter of the embassy. The embassy employees kind of laughed at that and said the Chinese military is there to watch what goes on at the embassy. 
• The embassy actually employs a lot of Chinese citizens to do some of the menial jobs (like custodial and grounds and maybe a few other clerical jobs) and the employees said those Chinese citizens are invited to a "tea time" with Chinese government officials on occasion. The employees think that is a time when the Chinese government interviews the Chinese embassy employees to see what information they can get out of them about the US. 
• The embassy employees live only a few blocks away from the embassy and they say there are hundreds of cameras along the streets that take pictures of them as they walk to and from the embassy. 
• The US Embassy once got in trouble from the Chinese government for publishing the air quality index to embassy employees because it gave Beijing such a bad reputation. (The pollution in Beijing is terrible - it was hazy nearly every day and every hour of every day that we were there and the tour guide told us that it was mist from the rain and clouds .... uh-huh.) 
• One of the conditions under which a church can become legalized in China is that they must allow the Chinese government to have a say in who its leaders are. Can you imagine how that might go over with the LDS Church? And the Chinese government is suspicious of religion because they see it as a way for the people to organize and rise up against the government. 
• One embassy employee said he helps with China's relationships with other Asian countries. For instance, he's involved (in some fashion that I'm not clear on) with talks between China and Japan over who has territory rights for a set of islands. 
• Another embassy employee said he helps with the relationship between China, North Korea, and the US. And he told us about a parade that North Korea just had and how anti-American it was, while a Chinese diplomat was there just watching. I guess the embassy was a little bugged that the Chinese diplomat was a spectator and didn't say anything to North Korea when we have a pretty good relationship with China right now. 
• The embassy employee who is the member of the church, told us about his work with the Department of Justice there at the embassy. He provides consultation to the Chinese legal system on prosecuting Chinese citizens and maintaining their rights as human beings. I think he also said something about how China won't extradite anyone to the US so consequently we won't extradite anyone to China... but I could be mistaken on that. 

After the embassy visit we made some quick visits to the Temple of Heaven due to the rain.

And then we went shopping at the famous Hongqiao Pearl Market - where they sell a ton of stuff, not just pearls. I talked a shop-owner down from 850 Chinese yuan to 110 yuan for a purse. Yeah, you bargain for everything in China.

I was still sick on Tuesday so I hung out at the hotel again, until that night when we went to the Olympic Park where they held the Summer Olympics in 2008.

those are kites!