Beijing sightseeing: Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven

On Thursday, I took a day off from the conference (since it was mainly the different Asian economies giving reports and I didn't really have to be there) and did some sightseeing together with Scott Dier, Alex Schmehl and Andreas Tille.

We first went to the Forbidden City. It was pretty impressive, and in particular, extremely huge. I took several dozens pictures of stone mosaics on the floor but unfortunately my memory card decided to have errors and so I lost all of them. Fortunately, I asked Scott to take some too (since his camera is much better and he's a much better photographer). Afterwards we went to the Temple of Heaven which was quite nice too. Unfortunately, the weather was quite cold and I was freezing the whole day (while Alex was not evening wearing a jacket). Maybe I should really stop wearing summer trousers all year round and dress properly during winter…

In the evening, we were looking for a place to have dinner. We approached some restaurants and asked whether they had a menu in English but after blank stares we figured they didn't and moved on. After a while, we got really hungry and Andreas suggested we should just go to some place and randomly choose something. However, Scott and I prefer actually knowing what it is that we order so we continued to look. Fortunately, we soon found a place where they spoke some English and had a menu we could understand. While we were studying the menu, our first surprise came. They brought a big bowl of steaming how water and we figured out that this is some kind of fondue place (it's called a hot pot). We ordered some meat and vegetables and then put them into the water. Since the water was so hot, the meat was ready pretty quickly so it was really nice; unlike most fundue I know where the meat always takes ages and by the time it's ready you have eaten all the bread and side dishes and are full already. Anyway, I'm glad we found this place since it was a really good experience.