Continuing the day 2 trip, we arrived at Tian An Men (天安门) after biking from Xi Dan (西单). This was the place where the protests once took place, unfortunately the roads were on locked down, and only pedestrians and bikers were allowed, some kind of summit apparently. I didn’t really get any photos either, because I was told by a cop to stop messing around with a camera, and I didn’t want to risk getting deported back to Canada, lol.

Many of you looking at the photos are probably thinking the same thing I am: Beijing looks pretty clean. The reasons for this is two fold: one, that day was very very windy, so a lot of the pollution got blown away; two, whenever some kind of international summit is happening, the authorities will shutdown the factories near Beijing in order to help with the air quality. Clearly shutting down the plants have an effect, because all I saw were blue, clear skies in the past few days, which, as my aunt tells me, is pretty rare.

The palace itself hasn’t changed in anyway, and there weren’t anything too noteworthy to write about. I managed to get a lot of shots, and some are more than usable for postcards I plan on making. I had a bit more time to do some street photography biking back, and I was able to do it while biking.

Just more tourist things.

-Tao