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Today was another day of Beijing sightseeing that started out a little later than Saturday’s Beijing tour. We took a bus ride to the Forbidden City, also known as the Imperial Palace in the heart of Beijing. The palace was ordered to be built by Emperor Yongle (the same as the tomb we visited on Saturday) when he moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing.
The palace has 9,999 rooms because it was believed that in the Temple of Heaven the emperors who had gone before had 10,000 so they wanted to be close to 10,000 for good luck but not exactly the same. Many of the buildings have a Chinese version of gargoyles on them, with animals to fight off the spirits. The higher the number the better luck you have, but they only do odd numbers so you will only find 1, 3, 5, etc. with 9 being the most prestigious. You will also find lions/dragons guarding the entrances, which are in pairs for luck and Feng Shui.
After our tour of almost all 9,000 rooms….it was so hot and humid, we went out for lunch. Lunch was the next stop. We, of course, assumed that we would have more rice, watermelon and Chinese food. The food was really good but again, it all starts to seem the same.
I didn't get any good pictures of the interiors, because these old grannies kept pushing and shoving me out of the way. Besides the shoving matches, I thought the Forbidden City was very beautiful - much more impressive than the Summer Palace. I also was able to get a bit of history on the Ming and Qing dynasties as well, which I really appreciated. 
Following lunch we returned to the hotel and had a quick rest before journeying out to the Silk Market for more shopping. Once in the room we found the little critter (seen in photo) on our bathroom floor. I wonder if these are the same bugs that you find at the Night Market on a stick?
The vendors their also want to make a deal but the haggling seems a little more civilized. Once you get the hang of it you can do quite well. The Silk Market had everything from clothes to toys, to crafts to silk, to jewelry and luggage.
 Dinner tonight was really good. It was still Chinese but included some different dishes we had not yet sampled. We had a great salad with ramen noodles (hard/crunchy), cabbage and cilantro. We had a pork disk with wide noodles and vermicelli. There was the typical eggplant dish, sautéed with garlic, and then some awesome lo mien noodles. We each got a bowl of udon style noodles which you had different sauces to add to the noodles including a chili pepper oil which gave it a nice spicy kick. There was the dreaded tomato and egg dish, still haven’t had the nerve to try that yet. We wanted to make a trip to Dairy Queen to take care of our urge to have sweets but thunderstorms kept us hotel bound tonight.
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