summer palace

So I've been sweating like crazy here in Beijing, as I move from place to place, seeing sights and getting things ready for my journey to the west. The first full day I was here, I took 3 lines of the subway (that's the maximum) to drop off my passport so as to get my visa fixed. By the time I got back to my base of operations, it was the afternoon, and I was soaked through.

I took a shower and a nap, got up, and took a cab to the new Summer Palace. It is gorgeous. Built around a lake after the "Anglo-French Invasion of 1860" burnt down the old one, much of it is a line of bridges connecting small islands across the body of water. On the north end of the lake, a palace presides over the complex, giant and imposing.

It was too late when I got there to go inside, but I was happy walking around the lake and decompressing. There were fishermen (I use that in the same way I use the word guys) all around the lake, and even a few people with spears. I can't be sure if they were going for frogs or fish, but this spear was one wicked looking implement.

As the sun went down, the Palace quieted, until I was practically the only 老外 there. I sat on a bench reading about what the Americas were like before Colombus, when a red flash of light caught my eye. It looked like it was the light of a radio tower in the distance, but because of the property of aerial perspective, it seemed too close. As I went to investigate, I could not figure it out. It seemed a red lantern was floating about 20 feet over the water, swinging back and forth, seemingly hung on the sky. UFO was my first guess, and I got pretty excited.

It turned out to be a man I had seen earlier flying kites. His wife had attached a battery-powered LED lantern to the string of his kite, and so in a sense, it was hung on the sky. It was fairly unworldy.