One more rough day to the collection. The plan for today was to go to Tiananmen square, then to the Forbidden City, and then, finally, find Ada a nice indoor playground.
Although our hotel is really nice, breakfast is kind of shitty, but that’s not really an issue. We started off by taking the wrong subway line. When Julia realized what we did, we got off the subway train, took the train back, and switched lines. Then we switched to the 2 line, that goes in a circle, but for some reason, it stopped after two stations, and we had to get off and wait for the next train. When we got to the Tiananmen station, we had to go up to the street level, then go back down to an underground passage to cross the street, repeat that process again, pass through security, go through one more underground passage and finally get to the square. Mind you, all this is with me carrying Ada in her stroller up and down the stairs, because god forbid they install any escalators or elevators for the tens of thousands of people who visit the site every day.
Anyway, we hung out in the square a little bit, and took the mandatory pictures. There are museums around the square, but we really don’t have time for them this visit. We decided that when Ada is older and we come to visit the family again, we’ll stop in Beijing for longer and spend more time exploring.
Then we went into the Forbidden City. Again, we decided to not spend too much time there. The Forbidden City is huge, and you can easily spend a whole day there, but we decided to move in a straight line, and only take a detour for the clocks and watches collection and for the treasure collection.
We messed up though. Because of all the unexpected delays, we only entered the Forbidden City at noon, which meant that Ada already skipped her morning nap, and we didn’t have lunch yet. So, we decided to move forward even faster, and try to get Ada to nap, so that she wakes up when we exit the Forbidden City right in time for a late lunch.
It took ages to get Ada to fall asleep:
She did, eventually, fall asleep when Julia put her in her carrier on Julia’s back. However, half an hour later, an old Chinese lady, in a typical move for old Chinese ladies, somehow thought she had to squeeze in to see one of the artifacts we were looking at, bumped into Ada, and woke her up. We were so mad and frustrated, but what could we do?
We sped things up a little and got out of the Forbidden City. We found a restaurant nearby and had our late lunch. Eating with Ada when she sits on my lap is my favorite thing now:
You may notice that behind us there’s a phone on a tripod. That’s a young lady live-streaming herself eating on a Twitch-like app. Mind you, she is sitting with a friend, and they are eating together, but do not exchange a word. It was Gottfried Liebniz who said that this is the best of all possible worlds. I’ll bet you twenty bucks that if he was in that restaurant with us today, he would have liked to reconsider.
Everyone was fed and mostly happy. All we had to do now is find that playground. Julia googled a mall and found one relatively close by called “Joy City”. We took a taxi there, but the mall was a huge disappointment. It had a pretty cool area for young teenagers, with a VR room, karaoke booths, and a fast-food place where all the servers are dressed as characters from Mario Bros. There were a bunch of other malls on the same block, but none of them had anything for babies at all, and we had already wasted way too much time in that area.
We decided to try a mall at a completely different area, so we got back on the subway. However, when got off the train we realized that Julia made a mistake, misread the subway stops, and we took the wrong subway line again. It was getting late, Julia’s phone was dying, and to top it off, Ada produced a massive poop and we had to change her in an alley. We messed up. Julia used my phone to communicate with her dad, who already got to Beijing. They set to meet somewhere between where we were and the hotel. And we got back on the subway.
We met up with Tize, and walked around to find a restaurant. When we found one, we realized Ada had just fallen asleep. We messed up once more, and we didn’t know what to do: should we wake her up for dinner, or let her sleep? The problem is that Ada needs two naps a day, and she missed her second one. However, if we were to let her sleep now, she would wake up in the middle of the night. We decided to let her sleep just a little bit and wake her up when all our food shows up.
This was a disaster, even though I’m not convinced it was the wrong decision. Ada screamed in protest for a quite a while, and I had to take her out of the restaurant to calm her down. Eventually she did, and we had a nice dinner. Julia ordered me a beer, and this is what showed up:
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Then we decided to split: Tize and Julia will inspect another mall to see if there’s a playground we can take Ada to tomorrow, while I take Ada back to the hotel. We got to the hotel, Ada was got a second wind and wanted to play, which was great, until it wasn’t. At some point she started screaming again. It was getting late, and she hasn’t got much sleep during the day at all. I tried to put her to sleep, but she wouldn’t. Mostly because the room was incredibly hot. Later, Tize would tell me that the entire city of Beijing is connected to a central heating system. The radiator in our room was emitting heat, and I didn’t want to mess with it, so I went to the front desk and asked them to shut off the heating, and they took care of it pretty quickly. After Ada finally fell asleep, Julia came and said that although they didn’t find a playground in the mall they went to, they got pretty good leads on a mall that does have one. We decided to take Ada there tomorrow morning and be better about timing her naps and meals.
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