China Trip: The Temple of Heaven

After our time spent visiting the different sections of the Great Wall we went back to Beijing for an afternoon to pick up our big luggage from the hotel and start the next leg of our journey.  Since we had an afternoon to explore, Matthew and I decided to join a small part of our tour group that were going to the Temple of Heaven.  This is another historical site in Beijing that was used by many previous emperors and important people during the dynasty days for religious ceremonies and prayer for a good year.  It isn't used anymore though, its now a tourist trap!

But we did see some pretty cool stuff when we went inside the first set of walls.  You had to pay to get into each of the different sections that are housed within the walls.  We stayed on the outside and explored the park area just because we could see the majority of the buildings from there and we didn't feel like paying to see more of the same stuff.  Maybe that was a mistake but ultimately, we don't feel sorry for missing the insides of the temple all things considered!  :)

We did see this pretty cool calligraphy artist 'painting' Chinese symbols (which we couldn't read) with water onto the walkway.  For all we know he could have been write random phrases that mean nothing at all but considering it was a religious place I would like to assume he was writing encouraging words.

The gardens were pretty awesome.  It was like a maze of paths that were broken up by these beautiful trees that grew at just the right height for hanging coats or using as a stretching bar for the many exercising people.  Every few yards (or meters, for their metric system) there would be an opening in the trees where people were participating in many favorite Chinese pastimes.  

This guy and about 3 buddies of his were flying their very intricate kites high in the sky.  This particular kite got caught at the top of that tree that is in between them in the picture and we watched as he steadily extended a pole all the way to the top of the tree and neatly hooked it and brought it down without any damage.  It was a pretty cool sight to witness.

We also saw many people working out by running the perimeter or doing ti chi.  Much to Matthew's excitement we even saw one guy doing some pretty cool martial arts kungfu! There were also people playing with these stringed toys that looked sort of like a disconnected yoyo.  I don't really know what they are called but they have two handles and a disk that rolls along the string from the two handles.  They can fling the disk thing up and catch it all while it keeps spinning.  If anyone knows what these things are call please let me know!  They were pretty cool to see though.

This is one of the buildings inside the Temple of Heaven.

And here is pretty much what the majority of the site looked like.  A lot of tourist walking along a long walkway to get to the next building that they had to pay to get into.  

 Here are some dancers that we saw just outside the tree line area.  There were many groups of dancers that had their own music and style of dancing for a workout but this was one of the biggest groups that we saw.  One strange thing that we noticed about all the people that we saw working out was that they were all wearing normal clothing.  No one was wearing what we were consider workout clothes: old, dingy or even just sweat wicking clothing.  It's like they just decided to join in on the dance party in their everyday clothing.

Even though we didn't go inside, we were still able to admire the beautiful architecture.  Beijing definitely has a lot of historic architecture that is cherished by the Chinese culture.

After we spent a few hours in the Temple of Heaven it was time to head back to our hotel to get ready to grab our next overnight train to Xian.