visiting the Temple of Heaven

Today brings you a largish set of photos from an excursion to the Temple of Heaven. This is a very nice temple in southeastern Beijing, with different pagodas, pavilions and gardens scattered on a pretty big area. While it is not as big and famous as the Forbidden City to its north, it is a very nice destination nonetheless. Besides the throngs of tourists, certain areas are largely quiet and frequented by people from Beijing coming to relax. It is very nice to see people playing cards, singing, knitting or even dancing. I put a short video-clip on Picasa, but the quality is not that great.

Also in most areas there is a soft background music which fits perfectly well.

Now I will continue with some random thoughts regarding Beijing, and my experiences here, but also the promised photos.

Beijing is huge, it took me 2 days to finally realize it but now I am certain. Maybe the fact that the places I want to see are scattered all around it – compared to the more grouped centers of cities in Europe – makes the matter worse. A distance which on map seems small proves to be a 20 minutes brisk walk. I will try one of these days to upload some maps from the GPS datalogger, although this is not a priority. Also there are a lot of people living here. From the hutongs to the parks, boulevards and shopping malls. Sometimes it is as if I am walking in a sea of people. This can be somewhat overwhelming but it is not so all the time.

Which brings me to the next hing – shopping. I am under the impression that this is something on everyone’s todo list. The best two examples are the Forbidden City, which has gift shops and cafeterias almost everywhere, and the commercial malls around Wangfujing. And these places are always full, even though I think the malls can accommodate a huge number of people. Wangfujing can be hard to navigate at certain times, more so as the dumplings festival is scheduled to start tomorrow and there are preparations made.

One other interesting thing – connected somewhat with the previous one – is how many  tourists are. Especially in the must-see areas there are at any time 4 or 5 groups of 30 of 40 people. And this is in the same courtyard, or trying to pass the same double-door entrance. There are several hat color coding schemes and the group guides are carrying different flags to better organize their groups. In all this throng of tourists it is amazing how few foreigners I see. I think less than 1% would not be a huge under-estimate.

I will continue with the story on next post, until then enjoy some photos.