Beijing // Day 9 - The Forbidden City, finally

FORBIDDEN CITY, FINALLY.

HEY GUYS. AFTER MUCH DIFFICULTY, I FINALLY MANAGED TO GET INTO BLOODY FORBIDDEN CITY.
Left the house early today, hoping the beat the crowd but noooooo when we got there, it was…… idk man. ‘Crowded’ would be an such an understatement. We saw over 50 tour groups at one location like, I cannot. LOL.

We went to get our tickets, hoping there was a queue for non-tour-group-tourists but noooo. We had to squeeze with the tour group. We felt so lost and didn’t know where to go cause tour groups were literally everywhere! We saw a group of people that bought the tickets the way we did and we followed them. When they presented their tickets to the ticketing officer (yes they jumped queue), they were asked to go to the back of the line not because they jumped queue but because they would only allow us to enter after all the tour groups have entered like WHAT!!?!?! That about impossible! So we just stayed around and after a lot of commotion and squeezing (it felt like a moshpit, really.) for 2 hours, we managed to enter. Phew.

 Did I mention an elderly lady almost passed out while queuing?! Goosh. 

Inside the Forbidden City, they cordoned off a lot of places. At first we thought it was closed but after roaming aimlessly for a while, it opened up and Sean made a guess that it was because the tour groups were the tour groups that were supposed to just walk through the Forbidden City and get out as quick as they could. Ohwell! We thankfully spotted the initially closed areas and made our way there. We saw a few thrones and one particular throne was moshpit part 2…… just to take a photo of a throne. I can’t believe I actually went. LOL. There were quite a handful of cool things but we only stayed for about 2 hours before heading up to Jingshan Park!

 These were honestly not moshpit-worthy :<

Jingshan Park is the park that overlooks the entire Forbidden City and where the last emperor on China hanged himself. We walked up the hill and got to the pavilion that overlooks the Forbidden City! Inside the pavilion was a giant Buddha statue directly in line with the Forbidden City. We didn’t stay for long and headed off for lunch!

 On the way upppp!

 First few cherry blossom trees we saw hehe. 

Sean found a café nearby that was called Oasis Café which had quite good ratings. To our dismay, it was closed till April. Our luck here in Beijing is really bad sigh. In the end, we decided to head back to Shuangjin and eat at xiabu xiabu, a hotpot shop we have been seeing a lot around Beijing. It turned our much better and filling than we expected!
Next up, we went to walk around the mall xiabu xiabu was in and we got some snacks to bring back home. It was about 5 plus when we decided to wrap our day up early today so back home we went~ that is why, here I am, blogging most of the entries I haven’t.

I’ll be flying back to Singapore tomorrow and I’m so excited! I can’t wait to get back to the country full of humidity because that beats getting burnt by 38 degrees water because my skin was that dry hahaha well~ thanks for reading!