My next day in Beijing was another free day so I decided to trust Beijing Top Ten (it’s a book) to see what two things I definitely needed to see. It told me that I needed to see the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace. I obeyed.
I went to the Temple of Heaven first. I rented the audio guide, but I still don’t know a lot about the place. I seem to recall that emperors from the Ming and Qing dynasties went there to pray for good harvests, but I could be wrong about that. If you can access this site, you can access Wikipedia, so look it up yourself.Anyway, it was a beautiful area with ancient cypress trees and beautiful architecture. Of course, I have pictures. Oddly, my favorite part, though, might have been the audio guide that included a map of the area with GPS, telling you where you were and automatically starting to tell you about where you were at as soon as you arrived. The deposit for it was 100 Yuan (about $16), so I almost kept it as a souvenir, but instead, I left it for another English-speaking tourist to enjoy on another day.
The Summer Palace is a bit out of the way, out in the outskirts of the city, but it is easily accessible by subway. Now, with respect to the Summer Palace, I truly have no idea of the significance.Presumably emperors went out there in the summer (makes sense, huh?) because the elevation is a little higher and the temperature is a little cooler. The area is surrounded by several acres of paths and is very wooded, so the area is used as a park by many people. The site is on the side of a lake and there is some beautiful scenery. The site also is on a hill, so it gradually elevates providing an opportunity to go up a ton of steps if you choose to enjoy the entire Summer Palace experience. Knowing that I was going to enjoy the entire Great Wall of China experience the next day, I opted to try to save my legs as best I could and so I stayed in the lower areas around the Summer Palace. (Note:After the fact, I was very happy I saved what little strength I have.)
That night I was on my own for dinner, so I hit a place that looked like a fast-food Chinese restaurant. I ordered crispy chicken and rice. It also came with a couple of sides, one was cauliflower and the other was unidentifiable – at least by me. The odd part of the meal was that even though the chicken was chopped, it wasn’t deboned, so I had to be careful of bones in what I was eating. (And when I say odd, I mean odd for western Chinese food. It’s common here.) It was enjoyable and everything together cost less than $4, so I couldn’t complain. I took a picture, but it came out too blurry to be helpful.
Nighttime meant another trip to the hostel bar. The hostel bar also had a restaurant, however, I never ate there. Another thing that the hostel bar had was a house bunny. A friendly rabbit hopped around the bar and took a liking to one of the women in our group so we played with the bunny while we drank. I can’t help but think that the poor guy is destined to be on the menu at the hostel at some point, but such is life. Or death. Or food.
That’s enough for this article. Next will be the Great Wall entry.
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