Forbidden City visit
If you are in Beijing this Spring, and not quarantined, it’s actually a great time to be a tourist. Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I took advantage of the beautiful weather to tour the Forbidden City. I can never remember a time when it was so empty. The picture belows gives some sense of how quiet, majestic, and deserted it was:
This would ordinarily be the busiest time of year, but we saw perhaps a couple of dozen tourists during our whole visit. The audio tours were discontinued, out of fear that the headsets could transmit SARS, and many of the side exhibits and souvenir stores were closed. The exhibits in the Forbidden City are actually not that impressive, particularly compared to the museum in Taiwan where most of the contents were removed: http://www.npm.gov.tw/. But the site itself continues to be amazing.
One sign of the times that caught my eye was this bit of trash in the creek that flows through the front of the Forbidden City (the creek itself is shaped something like a drawn bow), which contains one of the newly popular disposable plastic gloves (it probably washed down there from somewhere upstream in the recent rains).
The weather continues to be amazingly clement, with highs in the 70s and clear weather. So all the people who are spending more time outside exercizing are experiencing a beautiful Spring to counterbalance the fear and rumors of disease.