The Summer Palace

After the Forbidden City I headed back to my hostel, grabbed something to eat and then hopped on the subway again to get to the Summer Palace.

 The Summer Palace is in the North West part of the city, outside the outer ring metro line. It was about a 50 minute metro ride.

It is another palace that seems to be surrounded by city, but once you enter the walls it has a much different feel. As you walk deeper, beyond the first couple buildings you see you’ll find yourself at the foot of a lake.

The lake is called Kunming Lake and is a man made lake.

The palace itself, like many other places in Beijing, was burnt down and rebuilt at least once in it’s history.

The lake is quite large, and it all of a sudden felt like I wasn’t trapped in one of the country’s largest cities.

It was a beautiful day, with a very clear sky. It wasn’t terribly cold, but the lake still had chunks of ice in it. There were signs everywhere warning people not to walk on the ice. The spot I first went to only had chunks of ice in it, but further back the ice was solid.

Of course people were still walking on the ice. At first I could see people in the distance and I wasn’t sure how it was possible given the lack of ice near where I was.

I started to walk around the lake. My goal was to walk around the whole lake, but as I started going I could see there were several parts of the lake that I never saw from where I started. I walked for about 2 hours and wasn’t close to half way around.

 

That’s when I turned around and walked back to where I started. As I walked back to the lake the sun began to go down and there was a sunset over the lake. At this time several people were standing on the lake, a lot right in the middle. A lot were taking pictures of the sun set.