My room includes breakfast and the hotel puts on a nice spread of Asian and Western de-lites every morning, so I've been mixing it up Pacific-rim-fusion stylee with Dim Sum, French toast, kimchi, and shredded wheat. They've got an omelette chef too, but I haven't felt brave enough to order one yet. I'd probably get pickled octopus and scorpion jerky instead of mushrooms and ham.

The Dragon Tour minibus picked me up this morning around 8:30 and we headed out to the Summer Palace. Our guide was a very smart and funny young lady named Shou Yew Yew, which she informed us, translates into "Slow Clear Jade". Funny, my Mandarin dictionary translates that as "Jade Shoe". Well, it's her name, so she can translate it any damn way she wants. She told us to call her Lulu.

Lulu had been working as a guide for 4 years and her english was very good. An only child, a product of China's controversial "One Child" policy, she informed us that consequently, she was the "little empress" in her family. This meant that she never had to do housework because her parents wanted her to spend every waking moment fulfilling all of their dreams. She quizzed us on our knowledge of Mandarin and told us that regular Chinese don't say "Hello" when they meet...they say, "Have you eaten yet?" The Chinese are all about not starving.

There were 14 people in our group which apparently is yet another unlucky chinese number, very inauspicious beginning! There was an older Dutch couple, two young Brit couples on their honeymoons, an Indian guy from Sillycon Valley, and two youngish Chinese women with very severe hairdos and thick makeup that made them look like dragon ladies-in-waiting. Rounding out this motley crew was an Australian Scotsman, an older Cockney gentleman, and two Japanese women.

The old Dutch guy was a hoot, he kept cracking jokes and reducing the two Dragon Girls to intense giggling fits. I don't think they understood a word he was saying, but it didn't matter. They were a couple of little pistols, cackling incessantly into their cellphones in screechy voices and flirting with all the men on the bus, married or not. One of the young honeymooning couples had come all the way from St. Petersburg on the Trans-Siberian Express which I thought was indescribably cool.

We arrived at the Summer Palace after about 30 minutes of navigating through yet more awful traffic. The palace was the home of the dowager empress, Cixi, who ruled China for 48 years. The grounds are huge, you could spend days in there, and it's situated along a gigantic lake with a mountain behind it (as with all Chinese construction, Feng Shui and lucky numbers figure prominently in its layout). Lulu described its history in great detail, and I used my guidebook to vett her presentation, making sure that it was free of the usual state propaganda which typically blames all of the cultural destruction wreaked by Mao's fervent cadres on "foreign invaders". To her credit, she told the tale with a minimum of invented history. However, she did lie to to me once; when I asked her where I could find old propaganda from the Cultural Revolution, she said that it was unpossible since it had all been destroyed. My guidebook told me otherwise, and a street peddler approached me a few minutes later wielding a fistful of nostalgic Maoist literature!

The bus was waiting on the other side of the palace grounds to whisk us away to the next stop...a state-owned pearl outlet. All Chinese tour agencies apparently work deals with state or privately owned shops to deposit fat, dumb foreigners with wads of cash at their doorstep where they can systematically strip them of all working capital. The tour guide usually gets a cut of the action as well.

We were then given a brief presentation on how river oysters are seeded. When the presenter asked if anyone knew how to tell real pearls from fakes, I drew gasps from the shopgirls when I suggested rubbing them across your teeth to see if they feel gritty or smooth (real pearls are gritty). I also knew of three more ways to gauge authenticity, but I figured that revealing them probably would've caused these poor young ladies to swoon over my superior knowledge of pearl-wrangling. They followed me all over the store, plying me with offers of face cream made from ground pearls, pearl earrings, and pearl necklaces (the ones you wear around your neck). Since these state shops are priced 10-15 times higher than normal, I kept my hard-earned yuan to myself.

We then spent another half-hour trekking over to the Temple of Heaven, essentially another huge park full of massive pagodas and brobdingnagian altars, where the emperors offered up their yearly sacrifices for bountiful harvests. Lulu tried to keep us all together, but the Scotstralian and the old Cockney gent kept lagging far behind, so she started referring to them as the Turtle Men, a name that stuck to them for the duration of the tour.

We stopped at an old restaurant on the temple grounds. Lunch was included in the tour price, so I wasn't expecting top-quality grub, but I was very pleasantly surprised when they served up a delicious 12-course Cantonese feast that made the chinese food at home seem quite bland by comparison.

Finally, we ended up at the Forbidden City. Our bus couldn't get near it, so we had to ankle about a mile to reach the main gate. Along the way, we were acosted by an army of incredibly obnoxious and pushy souvenir peddlers all selling the exact same wares. The grounds of the palace were packed with tourists and many of the structures were not visible due to being swathed with canvas while undergoing reconstruction for the Olympics. Nevertheless, we managed to walk the entire length of the place while Lulu kept up a running commentary on the life of the emperor and his 3000 concubines. She attracted quite a bit of attention from other natives wherever we went. Apparently hearing someone Chinese speaking the laowai's barbaric language is still something of a novelty here.

After wending our way through another queue of surly peddlers, mothers with children trained to cry miserably on cue, and forgers pretending to be poor students hosting "special art exhibitions", we finally reached the bus and were taken back to our respective hotels.

Although I saw a plethora of wondrous sites today, I have to say that I was most impressed by the miniature mountain built out of stone with a temple on top that was constructed to permit the emperor and the empress to climb to the summit on certain festival days during which mountain-climbing was required.

Damn, it's good to be the emperor!

Next: The Not-so-Great Wall