Let me fill you in on the palace. It was first built as a school for aristocrat children to teach them in court etiquette. Most of the buildings today, including the centerpiece (a Confucian temple) date from 1866. In this year, the palace was rebuilt. Now, the building is used for many different things, such as an artisan market.
Wandering through the gigantic place I couldn't imagine how hard it must have been to rebuild any of it. It was amazingly beautiful. It had arches here and fountains there. I'm amazed at what was accomplished during the rebuilding.
About halfway through the morning, I walked past an artisan market where a Chinese man was calling out what I'm sure was something like "COME BUY MY BEAUTIFUL BIRD FEEDERS!" seeing as that's what he was selling. I decided to take a look.
What I saw amazed me. Not because it had a bunch of paintings and jewels. In fact, it didn't have any at all! No, what interested me was the way it was built. It was sort of cage like around an internal structure to hold the feed. I decided I'd buy one for my yard at home so that I could see all the little hummingbirds and blue jays.
Once I had bought the feeder I noticed that the man was extremely busy. I tried to pull him over to ask if he needed help, but he couldn't spare a moment over all the selling and shouting. Finally I just decided to walk into the stand and start helping wherever I could.
I think the man (whose name was Lidong) was relieved because he immediately slowed down and told me what to do. Surprisingly, he said all of this in English. Eventually, we were having a full on conversation about China and America. Apparently, this guy had heard from a video that China was soon going to become the number one English speaking country. I thought this was absurd, but then I looked it up and found this. He's right (if you trust YouTube that is).
Eventually, it was time for his stand to close up for the night. He, of course, would be there the next day, but I had other things to do, like go to the Jiāngsū Art Gallery... At least I learned how much help one person can give to a busy man!
2 comments:
I like how you move around to different hotels every night, and I like your blog name :D
nice blog really liked it i like how you put alot of pictures in there helped me understand even more better
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