China - Part 8 - Forbidden City, Emperors Courtyard thru the end...

The third and final Forbidden City post. Man, that was a LOT of pictures to go through. We have about twice as many, or more, than what I've shown in the three posts but I think these were the best and most descriptive of what we experienced.

Oddly enough, I don't have much to say so let's get on with the photos...

Can't hardly read this thing for some reason. Perhaps I've screwed up on the resizing of it so it's a bit skewed one way or the other.  No worries, the red arrows are what we're most concerned with anything.

This is the long corridor that eventually leads to the Emperors Courtyard (one of the doorways off to the left) and the Emperors Garden, which is the doorway at the very end of the corridor and the highest roof that you can see just over the top of the wall on the right.

This is simply looking down one of the doorways that was on the left in the photo above. We didn't go down this one but it is worth noting the high threshold again in this photo. It seems that even though the Emperors thought of themselves as "sons of Heaven", they were still a little skittish at the thought of little evil spirits running around their compound only to be stopped by 11 inch thresholds...

This is the first shot of the Courtyard as we were walking into it.

Another shot as we're standing around with our guide Nancy telling us various facts and stories about the courtyard.  I don't remember much of the facts of her stories but something about this courtyard was for the #1 concubine.

Here is Robby dancing with little Liena.  I wrote in a blog post about there being packed down snow that was quite slick. I started off teasing Liena by tapping my foot onto hers when she wasn't looking and pretty soon there after, she and Robby were dancing on the ice.  The friendship was officially on from this point forward.

Interesting shot of some statues that held specific significance in the courtyard. I have no recollection of that significance but I promise you there was some!  It's also a good shot to see some of the differences from building to building.

That's Momma and Robby in the back/middle there.  The brighter red area directly behind Momma is the doorway/hallway that we entered through. The little huddle of people on the right was because of some little Chinese dude who strolls around the FC with white glass plates and a sharpie.  He finds somebody he likes and then draws a cartoon likeness of them on the plate with some writings in Chinese and hopes that those people buy the plate from him after he's done.  The drawing he did was really cool but was made less cool when our guide translated the dollar amount that he wanted when he was done!  That being said, how many times in your life are you going to have a little Chinese dude draw your likeness on a plate while you're visiting the FC?

This is our first official shot of the Emperors Garden.  This place was so beautiful and, if I may sound rather goofy, very fairy tale'ish.  Unfortunately, our pictures don't really do it the justice it deserves. I've located a web page that has some better photos of it and you can see that here, but only after you've finished viewing the rest of our pictures!

See the little dude under the tree carrying the white plates?  That's him. Behind him is the doorway that we entered the garden through and that taller building is the one you can see several photos back over the "wall on the right".

Some of the rocks in this photo and the next one were brought in from other areas of China and other countries. They would only bring them in during the winter. The reason for that?  They would spill enormous amounts of water and make huge ice roads.  Then the workers (a.k.a. slaves) would pull these huge chunks of stone along the ice roads to get them into the FC.

This is one of the various walkways off of the path that we took.  We didn't get to go down these as we were pretty much out of time and were scurrying through here.

They had a bunch of these little pergola type thingymajigs where you can stop and have lunch on nicer days than the one we had. It was cold. Have I mentioned before that my toes were numb?

This was one of many, many, many fascinating looking trees in the garden!  Some of them had signs by them to tell a little history of when and why they were planted, others didn't, like this one.

Here's another one...  I could have spent an hour just looking at the trees.  Another hour just looking at nothing but the stones.  Alas, we got maybe 20 minutes to pass through everything...  not that I'm bitter about that.  Smiley faces everyone!

Yet another tree that is not your average "Iowa" tree.

There's some more regular looking trees!  This here is another shot of another area that we didn't get to explore.  I'm kinda curious as to what those statues are in the middle of the photo...

Crazy trees.  I wonder if the braches grow in a spiral or if they're 'coaxed'.

One crazy tree and several more normal ones... as if you couldn't have come up with that on your own.

A small stream flowed through the garden much like the big courtyard prior to the Meridian Gate.  I don't know the name of this one and have had considerable trouble trying to learn it from searching the fancy hi-tech world wide interweb.

A really crazy looking tree that piles of people who tour here get their photo taken by.  We would have but we were being ushered out that door that you can see on the left of the photo.

This is a shot of what you see immediately as you exit through that door above.  There appears to be a tall building and very large stones on both sides of it. I say that because the garden was built as a near mirrored image on the East and West sides.

That taller building in the background was the taller building that you can see in the photo directly above.  This is the moat on the North side and I was trying to capture the sun setting behind it... while jogging to the bus. If you squint and strain your eyes, you can see the bridge over the moat that crossed.

This is the building at the corner of the moat as the moat heads South. It was lined with weeping willows and was absolutely beautiful!  One might even go so far as to say breathtaking.

Sadly, that's our last photo of the FC and I was too tired to take any of our eventful walk/run back to the bus, of which we were still about 4 or 5 blocks away from.  After we got on the bus, we went on to the silk factory and I don't have many photos from that either. I would post them but they all have very clear shots of other folks' kids and I don't think it's right to publish those to the web without permission.

What's funny is that I can't even recall what comes next on our adventure.  I think this was on Saturday, so Sunday we traveled to Changchun, where we first met our little Caleb.

I guess we'll find out when we get there.  That's all for now.

Oh, and to go to check out some other photos and facts n' figures of the Imperial Garden, click here.