The Forbidden City and Beijing Zoo: Home of the (not so) Giant Pandas

The Olympics are coming, and Beijing is getting more and more crowded by the day, so the pressure to get all the sites to see checked off the list is building. So, this past weekend we put on our tourist hats and hit up the Forbidden City (home of the Chinese Emperor from the mid-Ming Dynasty through the end of the Qing Dynasty - if only I knew anything about Chinese history and hadn't had to look that up on Wikipedia just now!) and the Beijing Zoo. My observations: The Forbidden City is very, very big, and the famed "Giant" Pandas, at about 4.5 feet tall, are disappointingly NOT!

The Classic Forbidden City Shots...

Adorable? Yes. Giant? Not so much.

As it turned out, we (as white people) were more of an attraction at the zoo than the animals. The picture-taking requests are always frequent whenever I'm together with my blond roommate, but that day we were in particularly high photographic demand. After visiting the pandas, for example, I'm sitting on a bench with my friends, minding my own business, when I look up to see what was casting a shadow over the chicken leg I was enjoying, to find a child who has come up and is posing next me while her father is trying inconspicuously to take a picture. She was really cute so I made him take one with my camera too...

Glad I could be of service?