China - Part 13 Puppet Palace, Changchun

Part II of the Puppet Palace tour.

Now that we're home and going through pictures, this tour in particular reminds me a little bit of high school. What do I mean by that? Well, I didn't pay attention in high school and I certainly didn't pay attention on this tour. Loose translation? I didn't learn much from either.

Here's an example of not learning much.  This building?  I believe Echo said it had something to do with a maids quarters but anything beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

Again... I'm not really 100% sure, but I think this was a temple of sorts.  I did recall something from the Hutong tour though and that was that they used the colors red and yellow to indicate importance. So that would make sense if it were indeed a temple.



This is the/a throne room although I can't seem to find a magazine rack anywhere near that throne!

This was the orchestra room.  The thingymabob on the left side of the photo is a spindle on a half wall that the band would be behind.  I can't recall for sure if the band were prisoners or if there was some other significance to them.

This is the dining hall. Note the bright red throne towards the upper/right of center of the photo.  There were specific places for people to sit, either on the left or right side of the throne and whatnot.

This was just a big atrium type area that went up thru both levels of this particular building.  The level of detail that you see in person is nowhere near what you can see in the photo.

This is the entry way/exit of that big atrium that we just saw in the last pic.  We are, at this point, leaving the Puppet Palace and heading out thru the garden area and to the gift shops for us sucker tourists.

This is the gate that closes off the official grounds of the Puppet Palace.

Shot one of the garden area.

Shot two of the garden area.  It's much bigger than the little bit that we saw, and yet again, there was some significance to how the little bird baths and stuff are arranged throughout here.

Here's the Schmitz Mobile Chaos Unit dressing up the garden as only we can.  Thing area behind us is a pond of sorts but was obviously dry because of the bitterly cold winters in Changchun.

This here is not too far from that last family photo.  To get back to our bus, we walk this big patio area to well past those pine trees up ahead.  It was much warmer than when we went into the Puppet Palace, but it's still not a nice spring day out.  What I'm saying is, it was a long walk and a good way to wear off some of the sausage and bacon a fellas had been consuming at this point.

The pine trees at the very top left of the photo are the same ones you can see in the previous photo.  We came down a very large set of stairs just to the right of the concrete doo-ka-hickey's that you can see on the right hand side of the photo.  Most of the stuff that I've forgotten about in this post didn't really bug me, however I wish I could recall what these little plants were.  They look like little trees but are literally about 8 - 10 inches tall. That was it for our tour of the Puppet Palace. We went thru a few gift shops that had the same touristy type "collectibles" as all of the other little shops of the same ilk. The only cool thing they had for sale in there was a collection of cars that were factual to the time of the Puppet Emperor.  Other than those,  I wasn't impressed and waited outside for most of it.

I recall writing something about this restaurant in an earlier post but we didn't include any photos.  This was the restaurant that had separate rooms for all of their customers.  Let's say you wanted a private dinner for two.  They had little rooms set up with just a table for two.  A party of four?  Same deal.  We had 14 in our party and had to be moved to a bigger room and that bigger room is the one you see in this photo and the next.  Our bus driver for the day is the guy standing up.  When we walked back to the bus after our lunch, I was carrying Caleb and the driver came up to me and pretty much insisted  through hand motions that I should put him down. I did.  The driver immediately put Calebs hood up and tied it under his chin, then took him by the hand after saying something to him in Mandarin. He held Calebs hand all the way back to the bus which was probably a little more than two city blocks.  When we got to the bus, he politely handed Calebs hand back to me, again after saying something to Caleb in Mandarin.  He also had a huge smile on his face for the entire walk.

Another shot of the room we were in.  Right outside of those windows was a really tight, dirty alleyway with a ton of bikes, clotheslines, and little gardens with trellis's because I'm guessing with space as tight as it was, they had to grow things 'up' as opposed to using too much ground space.

That does it for the Puppet Palace tour.  I believe our next stop will be the few photos we took of the orphanage.

As always, thanks for reading!