The next morning in Beijing before heading out I changed rooms to the one I'd reserved, one that didn't have a computer. While this change was bad for my blogging, it was good for my sightseeing. I walked back to the train station, where there was a subway stop. The subway felt much different than Shanghai's, which itself was like Hong Kong's, having apparently been built by the same company. That one was all modern and streamlined; this one by contrast reminded me of the ones in Russia, with its austere marble-like interiors and flimsy paper tickets. (They do, however, also seem to use the stored-value RFID cards.) The thing about Beijing generally is that even if the rest of modern China makes you forget, Beijing reminds you that China is still a communist country. Though modern development is rampant and foreign commercial endeavors abound, Beijing is still largely shaped by its post-1949 past. Hence the strong aesthetic reminiscent of places like Warsaw and Moscow, and hence the inhuman scale it presents itself on to tourists.
Then again, Beijing has always had a thing for massive scale, as evidenced by the Forbidden City, which is where I spent most of the day. To get to it I first needed to walk north through the enormous Tianamen Square, doing my best to avoid what my guidebook warned were hustlers (Chinese people who would approach you unbidden and say, "Hi, where are you from?" which was a social habit I encountered nowhere else in China but here) and souvenir vendors and even just the crowds of people themselves. I also gaped at the incredibly long line snaking around of people waiting to see Mao in his mausoleum. I'm not great at making these kinds of estimates, but I'd have to think that the line was at least a kilometer long.
Still heading north I eventually entered a large, ancient gate yet still was not yet inside the Forbidden City. More northerly walking was necessary just to hit the ticket booth, and then once inside, even with four hours or so of walking more I still never reached the backside of the complex. Then again, part of that was because I was poking around some of the passages and "palaces" located to the side of the main north-south axis. The Forbidden City, now called the Palace Museum, is where Chinese emperors lived for 500 years. It's a walled city, where commoners were kept out, and filled internally with more walls and temples and "palaces" (residential-type buildings where wives and concubines and such lived), with complexes within complexes. It's hard to describe how vast it all is, though. Everything is very spread out and isolated by design. But I liked that about it, even when the skies did open up with thunder and lightning and pour down buckets and buckets of water. At the time I was off in some quiet wing and could take cover under an awning. It was peaceful there, watching the rain come down, away from the bustle and noise and pollution of Beijing. The weather all over China during my trip had been hot and sticky, and coupled with the air pollution I found the atmosphere in Beijing particularly to be suffocating. Being caught in the rain in some quiet, ancient courtyard was a nice change. (All the buildings also are protected by lightning rods, so the thunder wasn't a concern.) I wasn't alone there, but I've noticed that in China, if you are in a space with fewer than a dozen other people around you, for all intents and purposes you can consider yourself "alone"...
The only problem with the weather was that so much rain fell that certain parts of the complex got kind of flooded. Not in any damaging way, but in ways that involved wading through large puddles here and there. So after having already spent many hours there and being drained of energy I eventually left and made my deceptively long way back to the hotel. The hotel conveniently had a restaurant in it so I was able to get some takeout for my room. Inconveniently there was very little I could recognize on the menu - even the English version of the menu they had given me. I really wasn't up for eating things like turtle... but I still wasn't sure what I had ordered. Happily it turned out to be sweet and sour pork, which was pretty good.