Everything in China means something. This is an example of a door in the Forbidden City, nine is a very auspicious number in China so there are nine by nine little knobs on all the doors.
The more animals on the roof, the more important the building. Nine is the maximum number of animals on the roof. As you can see this is a pretty important building.














This is a giant water vat for fire extinguishing. The buildings in the Forbidden City are all wooden, so fire extinguishers are very useful.



Maybe some of you will recognise this throne, the Last Emperor is the only film that was shot in the real Forbidden City.

Surrounding the main room is a three tier marble structure, it represents the clouds and heaven and shows that the Emperor is closer to the gods than anyone else.

China

Well at last I'm getting around to updating my blog. It's raining so I'm takng this opportunity. I'll begin with my first trip to China last September. I went to Beijing (Peking) and Tianjin, about 2 hours drive away. The reason for my trip was to meet our prospective new students and check out their English. I also managed to get in a bit of sightseeing.

Here are the guys in their classroom at the Aeoronautical University in Tianjin. The uni is huge andthey train all sorts of people for the aeronautical industry.














There was a festival coming up; I think it was the national day; so the were lots of preparations going on in Tianemen Square. They were building a couple of models, one was of the enormous dam that's being built and the other was of Tibet. Here it is half finished.




Chairman Mao's tomb is also in Tianemen Square. There was a veeery long queue of people waiting to pay their respects to him going around it. Here's a photo of me and our guide "Michael" with the tomb in the background. Many Chinese people take on a western name when dealing with foreigners to make our lives easier.














For some reason I can't upload any more photos, so I'll begin another post.