Summer Palace

Hello everyone! It is raining pretty hard here and we don't have any sightseeing scheduled today, so I am catching up on blogging and pictures. I seem to be having some weird things happen with my picture gallery. I am working on it hopefully it will be working soon. The picture above is from the summer palace. The palace was built for the Emperor so he could get away from it all in the heat of the Beijing summer. They dug this enormous lake that you see and piled up the dirt behind it so they could have a mountain. The landscaping is beautiful and as you can see you can rent a boat, paddle boat, or ride across the lake in a large boat like this one. We walked across the bridge that you see to an island and then rode the big boat to the palace. It is so large that we walked around for about 3.5 hours and we didn't even see it all. We took another boat, it think it is a keel boat, with one big oar in the back to another street on the palace grounds. It reminded me of Venice with the shops lining the water streets. We shopped and I had my fortune told by an old Chinese guy. I am sure he enjoys making money off of the tourists!
We headed back in taxi, the traffic was really bad and we had to show our tickets for the evening session to a security guard to exit the highway and get back to our hotel. I am glad I stuck them in my trusty backpack!