China - Part 12 Puppet Palace in Changchun - Part 1

Roughly -6 degrees (farenheit) when we left the confines of our lovely hotel that morning, bellies full of eggs, sausages and bacon... and fruits and and other crap that nobody cares about. It's the sausage and bacon that brings everything home and somehow makes it real. We're not hiding anything from anyone at this point.

So, it's cold. Real cold.  To be perfectfully honest, I'm not all that excited to go on another tour at this point in our trip. I'm not sure that the excitement of adopting Mr. RongBo has fully defrosted my toes from the tour of the of the Hutong from several days prior.  It's COLD here!!

Mr. Caleb is probably a little more excited to go on a tour than the rest of us at this point but we're in China, let's pile onto the bus and go.  As I look back into my journal of that particular day, I was not much more impressed then as I am now recollecting the experience.

So be it, here we go...

The Puppet Manchuria Palace Museum (also known as the Puppet Emperor's Palace and Exhibition Hall), is the imperial palace of the former puppet Emperor PuYi, who resided here from 1932 to 1945. Emperor PuYi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, was installed here by the Japanese and was commandeered as the 'puppet emperor' of Manchukuo in 1934. The  movie The Last Emperor was directed based on Emperor Pu Yi's life. The Puppet Emperor Palace has become a famous landmark in Changchun, Jilin province and quite frankly, one of the only big attractions that Changchun has.

 

The imperial palace mainly consists of a group of two-storey buildings roofed with golden enamel tiles including the Qinmin Building, Jixi Building and Tongde Palace. Until today, the architecturally distinctive and East-West fusion style still remains as fairly unique from the surrounding area.

B.S. aside, let's get to the photos...

I think Robby's face in this photo pretty much represents the entire attitude of the family for this tour.  Truthfully, it's two days after you've received your little dude (or dudette, if that's the case) and you just kind of want to spend time with them in a private setting.  Nothing against Holt, Lotus Tours or anybody else, but that's just the way I felt at that point.

Here's the boys on the walk from the bus til the entrance gate of the Puppet Palace.  We had just witnessed the community exercising equipment outside of the gates where you purchase tickets, so I figure if they can exercise in -6 degree weather, we can probably go on a tour.  The boys were doing pretty good at this point.  Playing together on the bus, teasing, harrassing and whatever else that brothers do. Regardless, they were being sweet here walking hand in hand with each other.   I'm not sure if I've mentioned the fact that it was COLD!!! 

Here's the entry way.  That's our guide Echo, going up to present our tickets and get us through the gates without any woes.

Here we are on the other side of that entry way.  I believe that there are 13 rows of thingymabobs on the doors here.  Quite honestly, it's too cold to truly care about that.  The clock is also stuck at about 9:10am and there's a good reason or significance for that. What is it?  I can't recall...  Echo told us but I don't have a clue anymore.

Yet another courtyard on our tour of greater China.

Another doorway of some sort.  I have no idea...  Get used to this level of descripton because I was less than enthralled at this point of the so-called "hub-bub".

Most of these photos are just going to go by without a comment because I have no idea how to comment on them.

This here was the music room according to the tour.  Unfortunately, there were no fantastic electric guitars here or anything of that nature, but we did see a sweet old crank style turntable with a single record on it.  No additional Beatles, Zeppelin, or KISS albums were in site.

This is another shot of the music room. I do not know the brand of this particular organ, but it appeared to be in fantastic shape. I doubt we'll see it on Craigslist or EBAY anytime soon.

These wax figures would sort of freak me out when we'd encounter a room with them in it.  Thankfully they were not real and did not haunt us...

That is me and two fantastic little boys standing in the entry way of this building... whatever it is.

That's it for for part 1 of this tour. That's right, I'm dividing it into two because we've still got a few more pictures to go.  We had our favorite dinner of the whole trip on this day and hopefully I can include a photo or two of the restaurant that we were in to show you part of the reason why it was our favorite.

Until then, take care of one another, it's all we truly have.

God bless.