Beijing -Temple of Heaven & Summer Palace

The Temple of Heaven was a place the Emporer would come and and pray for good harvests and for the peoples sins. It's a 300 hectare park in the middle of Beijing that has a big temple in the middle where animal sacrifices were made. It was nice and green with lots of grass that was beig watered that you weren't aloud to play on. In the foreground you can see a little no feet sign, in the background you can see some people reading what looks to be a map, may be they were lost?

We went to the Temple of Heaven on Thursday and there was lot of people doing various forms of excerise. This photo here shows a bat an ball type game / dance that some of the people were doing. We ended up buying a set for the kids, actaully we ended up buying a heap of stuff at this place. They must have been hiding behind the trees or sometime because when I turned around from watching these people playing / danceing there was several people trying to sell us fake Olympic gear, Gucci bags, watches etc. we ended up buying some more Olympic gear and two Gucci bags, as well as the bat and ball set for my dancing back at home. The locals were quite impressed how the big man could catch and throw the ball with soo much grace, yeah right.

Further round the park this little man was twiddling these wooden things around to make a clicking sound and telling a story of historical times. This is a traditional way of keeping the history alive, apparently this guys was quite good but I could understood a thing he was saying, funny that.With in the Temple of Heaven there is this door, it's called the 70 year old door and apparently if the Emperor was over 70 years old he could use this door instead of walking all the way around to the main entrance. I was pretty tired by this stage afer all the play with the bats and balls, but Oliver told me they wouldn't open it up for me to get through

And here we have us standing in front of the Temple of Heaven, again very impessive, lots of colour, lots of marble and just soo big.

The next place we went was the Summer Palace, the Summer Palace is where the Emperor went in the summer to get away from the heat of the city. It's a massive area with a big lake and island in the middle.

Above is the covered walk way from the entrance to the place where the Emporer would pray. It is over 1600 metres long and has about seven thousand different paintings on the pillars and beams.

To get across the lake to the island you can take a dragon boat, you can also hire boats for your onw use. If you hire a boat beware of the dragon boats as tehy seem to seek out hired boats and run them down, on our five minute trip across the lake we managed to hit two little boats, nobody seems to mind though.

In the winter the lake freezes over and peopleskate and play ice hockey, some poeple even break the ice and go swimming, I must come back i the winter and try that.

The tour we were on was a government onwed tour company and they seem to link up with other govnerment owned businesses. Between the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace we went to a silk factory where they showed us how silk was made and how quilts were made, I have some photoos on this we can view at the slide show. We actually bought a quilt and when we got on the plane to leave Beijing it was amazing to see how many other people had bought quilts. After the Summer Palace we were taken to a pearl factory, again government owned but Alison wasn't tempted here.

Well, I think that's about it for day 1, I'll try and get more up to date over the next couple of days.