We saw two of the great sights in Beijing today. The pictures attached to this are Kathy in front of Mao's tomb in Tienanmen Square (notice the statue of the Communist Workers over her shoulder); a shot of the two of us just outside the entrance to the Forbidden City with a picture of Mao in the background (the Chinese words written around him say "Workers of the world, unite!"), and finally a pic of Kathy in the Forbidden City rock gardens.
The sorta interesting thing I noted as we were seeing these two sights was the way our tour guide, a nice guy named Wally (his real name is somewhat unpronounceable Chinese), spoke about China and its history. He seemed obsessed with reminding us how much everyone loved Mao and how great the past 60 years of China's history was. He said the entire country cried when Mao died. Someone commented that the folks who did not cry were the tens of millions that Mao had killed during his reign. Wally never really spoke about how devastating the Cultural Revolution was and how it basically destroyed an entire generation of intellectually gifted Chinese citizens. Everything about China is perfect and could not be better. We heard several times about how the gap between rich and poor is really small and everyone lives fabulously.
Wally is a great guide and we are enjoying what he tells us, but I have to censor his stuff every now and then and explain to Kathy the real truth behind some of the stories.
By the way, one funny thing I noticed about Wally's stories in the Forbidden City… Wally loves to talk about all the Emperor's concubines. I did not know this, but it was not at all uncommon for the Emperor to have about 100 different concubines. Wally said that most of the emperors would die at a young age because they spent so many nights with one or more of the concubines. These guys literally $@^@! to death! Well, if you gotta go… there are worse ways to go ;)
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