It's funny how being on the road everyday you can easily start to reminisce about old times. One thing that we have always enjoyed was dinner with our friends. So tonight, come join us. You can even imaging that your siting opposite of us. (Since we are actually sitting on the same side of the table, the lighting was better) I believe Szechuan was on the menu for dinner, you can even have an ice cold Tsingtao. Our treat...
The 798 Art District in Beijing was easily one of our favorite sites in this bustling city. World class art, housed in what was once military factory buildings. Even these factories could be a museum all on there own without any art inside. Built with large skylight windows and swatooth shapped roofs which maximized natural light provided a blank canvas for atist to show their work.
Since I was respectful of the artist and the galleries I took no photos of the lovely work inside these spaces. I did on the other hand take my liberty shooting all the street art filling in the nooks and alleyways within this neighborhood. While we only ended up spending a good half day walking around you could easily spend a full day and possibly even two exploring every museum.
When you don't think you can look at another temple in Asia, you find yourself once again at a temple fighting the crowds and eating ice cream like it's going out of style. While we both had a bad case of the grumpy pants while visiting this temple it was quite beautiful. The temples were built circular which was not common in these times. There was even a circular wall surrounding one of the temples where if you yelled on one side of the wall it would travel the length of the wall to your wife listening on the opposite side. Hoooooneeeeey!
The three main temples were called The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, The Imperial Vault of Heaven & The Circular Mound Altar. After exploring these three sites, we walked around the gardens surrounding the temples for a while before taking turns napping on a bench with other tired chinese.
One of the great but quickly becoming exploited neighborhoods of Beijing would be the hutongs. The hutongs are alleys formed by the courtyard residences of Siheyuan traditional houses. While a lot of the original hutongs have been demolished to make way for new roads and buildings some have been protected. Recently even some hutongs have been reconstructed since they have become a tourist hotspot.
While some Hutongs seem overly touristy we were lucky to find a few off the beaten path where the coffee was delicious and the beer was cold. Our two favorite liquids to drink while exploring a new city. There were also some cheap shopping to be found while walking around at night. Plenty of dresses, bracelets and and Mao inspired goods lined the dark alley ways.
The Great Wall has so much history I'm just going to skip over all of it since you probably know enough already. What I will say though, is that the Great Wall is not visible from the moon like once believed. Now just because it's not visible from the moon does not mean it's not great. Far from it actually, this wall is most certainly great. I'm even surprised it's not called The Magnificent Wall of China. It's that impressive. And there are no lack of steps to make even the most fit person huff and puff a little bit.
We were lucky to see the wall on the clearest day we have seen on our trip to date. We walked up and down the steps in a restored section before sliding past a barrier. Past the barrier we found a section of the wall that still hasn't been made people friendly. The old section of the wall had lots of overgrowth and even a few trees finding a place to grow on top of the wall.
