Temple of heaven

Wednesday, 9/3 written by Erik

New blogger this time around. It will probably mean more spelling mistakes and less yummy in the tummy expressions, but hopefully not less informative.

We started the second day in Beijing by going to the vietnamese embassy to get visas for the rest of the crew. Alan and I decided to take the subway there. The day before, he had followed the tip in the china guide to buy multiple tickets at the same. However, when he inserted he ticket it was expired. Alan was very sad. The subway tickets in Beijing are 30 cents everywhere, very clean, and people don't push like in New York. The Chinese have a funny way of starting to move towards the door several minutes before their stop. To avoid the pushing and shoving I guess. Even though we were already late to meet Priscilla and Steph at the embassy, we could not resist making a stop at Starbucks.

The sightseeing of the day was the Temple of Heaven. It is where the emperors of Ming and Qing dynasties worshiped heaven and prayed for bumper crops. The park had beautiful pine trees, I could not find the name. The Long Corridor leading up to the Temple was an interesting place. A lot of the locals were playing cards and odd instruments and singing opera songs there. Everybody could sing along, even people who can't sing like myself. They bring microphones and speakers to the park. Its like a karaoke without the drinking part. There was also locals dancing. Steph decided to dance with the elders (not me). In the old days the long corridor was used for animal sacrifice.

After walking through the corridor we got to the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest. It was build in 1420 during the Ming dynasty. It is the most famous temple in the world according to the guide book. It is 32 meters high, about 70 feet. It is all made of wood without use of nails. The construction represents ancient Chinese philosophy and astronomic knowledge (the hall is supported by 12 columns representing 12 months in the year etc). Pretty impressive construction considering when it was built. Would almost think it was built by Norwegians. I will suggest adding that fact to the guide book.

Next up was the Echo Wall. It is a big circular wall where you can actually stand on one side facing the wall and talk to another person standing by the wall some 300 feet away. Alan was the one who read the fact in the guide book, but he was doubtful it would work. Priscilla made him try it and it did work! Chinese are pretty clever with their construction.

The Temple of Heaven was lots of fun. We also met a 10 year old boy named Lev who was half chinese and half australian. He was a very smart little boy who accompanied us for part of the excursion. He was interesting to talk to, he had traveled around the world a lot...more than some of us. He thought New York was nice and LA a dump so we accepted him as our friend. As a test of whether I would consider adopting him I asked him whether Scotland is a dump. He said he did not know so we decided to say good bye to him.

At night we had hot pot for dinner. It was very good (aka yummy in the tummy). Each person had an individual pot. We had lamb, beef, shrimp, greens, mushrooms and fish balls. We decided to go to bed early as we were going to get up at 5:30 next morning to go to the great wall at 7:30am.

We have to thanks charles for arranging the taxi for us. Instead of getting a crammed taxi for four of us, he negotiated and booked a mini-van. Nice and comfortable.