The Summer Palace.

What an amazing place! This was the Emperor’s palace during the summer (pretty obvious, right?) because it is located directly along the beautiful Kunming Lake.  Although it is almost October, it was still pretty warm in Beijing.  The breeze instantly cooled you off though.

 

Unfortunately, today was not a good air day so all my pictures turned out a bit gray.  However, I got to see the Emperor’s office.  He sat in a chair with a mirror behind him.  The mirror had etchings of the Chinese character for longevity in dozens of different styles.

I don’t know if it was because it was Friday or so close to National Day but there were a lot of people visiting the Summer Palace today!  We had to dodge the large tour groups as we walked along corridors and explored buildings!

We all decided to trek to the top of the Pavilion of the Fragrance of Buddha.  To be honest, I have no idea why this building is called that but we were all pretty excited to see the top!

Then we saw the steps.  They were steep and slippery but we all made it up in one piece.  We walked about 3 full flights of steps like this.

It was absolutely worth it!

We took a short dragon boat ride (I got to ride in a dragon boat!) across Kunming Lake to see the Rubber Duck! Florentijn Hofman, a Dutch artist, created a large floating rubber duck.  It has been touring the world and I got to see it in China!

Lots of tourists were taking pictures and an elderly Chinese woman wanted to take a picture of me and her together with the duck.  It was so much fun her friend asked to take a picture with me too! Some people did not seem to appreciate the art installation because it seemed disrespectful to have to rubber duck in the middle of a very ancient and historic place.  However, I thought it was fun.  It attracted even more tourists to the area and everyone seemed to be smiling and taking goofy photos.

I really, really wanted to buy a miniature rubber ducky souvenir to add to my collection at home.  However, since it is associated with a worldwide art exhibit (if that’s what you want to call it), they were disgustingly overpriced.  They were selling a normal sized rubber duck for 299 yuan.  That’s almost $50 USD! Although I really wanted it, I couldn’t even impulse buy because I only had 50 yuan on me. 

I found a link to an article about the massive rubber duck if you are curious and want to know more!

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/814249.shtml#.UkWQQD8m2DA