It all started with a morning trip to the Summer Palace. Summer home of the Emperor, built for his lovely mother, or something like that. Not a bad gift for your mother's birthday, although I am sure the Emperor himself did not get his hands dirty in its years long building process. The man made lake especially took a long time, fifty years or something. Pretty sure his mother was long gone by the time it was finished. But maybe all of that isn't true, we didn't really listen to the tour guide. One thing is for certain, it was a very picturesque place.
We did a lot of walking (as you will see later). Most of the walking at the Summer Palace was done in this corridor, which happens to be in the Guinness Book of Records for the World's longest corridor. Supposedly half a mile long, maybe more. It was amazing to see how intricate the whole thing was. If you look carefully in the picture, you can see that there are paintings everywhere on the corridor, Chinese scenes, stuff like that. There was actually a painting that looked like Elvis, and another of a Monkey King, which Alastair put two and two together and named it King Kong.
Next we took a quick detour to check out the Bird's Nest, home of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. It was pretty cool, amazing how even four years on, people (us) still want to come by and take their photo, posing as though they were really cool athletes. Who would do that?
Probably the coolest place that we went on this day was the Temple of Heaven. If the Great Wall is the symbol of China, then the Temple of Heaven is the symbol of Beijing. For some reason, this was not a part of the organized tour that we were with, but we decided that we had to go and see it anyways! While most in our group were roaming around the markets, we went with a few married couples to see the Temple of Heaven.
The Temple of Heaven was/is a place to give thanks for a good harvest, and to ask for help. Its real name is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest, so that makes sense. There was a bunch of other buildings around and people singing what we think were kind of hymns or something. Also, we bought a little kind of shuttlecock thing that people play a hackiesack game with. We have joined in with a few groups of Chinese people who play, but we don't play long because we are really bad and end up ruining their fun! We ended up kicking the shuttlecock thing in the tree! Twice! Ah well, it was a lot of fun, and playing local games with local people is a good way to try and immerse ourselves in the culture.
Well as you can see, lots of walking coupled with new flip-flop sandals was not the best combination for Laleinia's feet. But she soldiered on like a champ, soaking in as much of Beijing as she could while we were out in its streets and alleyways.
Oh we also spent some time today at a Silk Factory, which was really quite amazing, and also at the Pearl Market, where Laleinia got a Pearl necklace and Alastair got some headphones. Nice. We also changed money at the bank. Just some odds and ends for you. Bye.