Temple of (Sacrifice) Heaven

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.

Hutong Schmutongs

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 Magnificent Wall of China

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.

Summer Palace

One of our favorite sites in Beijing was the Summer Palace, also known as the the Garden of Nurtured Harmony. On one side of Longevity Hill are all the temples, and a lovely village with a river running through the middle of it, and on the other side of the hill you have a very large lake. Which actually takes up 3/4 of the Palace.

It's a tiring walk from one side of the hill to the other, but the temples are intersting and the scenery is lovely. After making it to the lake, we decided we deserved the easy route around the lake to the exit and took a boat carved to look like a dragon across the lake.

 

The Forbidden City

Our first stop in Beijing seemed like the only place you could start a trip in this city. Tienamen Square the political center of China for the last 500 years. This famous square houses the Forbidden city which is an unbelievably large complex, 7,800,000 sq ft to be exact. It contains 980 buildings built between 1406 - 1420. For about 500 years it housed the emperors, and family of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. We walked over the bridge to the first palace with a few thousand other people mostly other Chinese tourist learning about their country's history.

The Forbidden City is beautifully constructed old chinese architecture that you could easily spend a few days exploring. With melting ice cream we weaved through the little streets, and life was good. We finally left around closing time to hike up to a look out right outside the palace, where we could see just how smoggy it always is over Beijing. Now we realize why it was hard to walk up a few flights of stairs.