Beijing, China Temple of Heaven, Forbidden City

Tuesday, March 19, 2019           Beijing, China  

Everyone had a harty hotel buffet breakfast and headed out to the bus to go to the Temple of Heaven. Howard, our guide, gave us a quick talk about the spiritual side of the Chinese culture. He spoke about Taoism and Buddhism.

From what I gathered, Taoism, stresses concentrating on the present life. It is based on the year of the animal that you are born in. My birth year was the year of the horse and basically said that I would be a success. Larry’s birth year was the year of the snake and he would be resourceful. We have seen these little charts in the American Chinese restaurants that show your birth year and the animal that pertains to our year. Certain years are lucky or unlucky.

From what I gathered, Buddhism stresses the afterlife. Everything that you do or think gets you ready for eternity, life after your existence on Earth. Howard, a Buddhist, wore a bracelet of wooden beads that helped him to relieve stress. Howard clutched his beads and fingered them constantly…making me wonder whether we were causing him to be stressed. Meditation is a big part of Buddhism. 

Our bus pulled up to the Temple of Heaven where we enjoyed watching the local folks exercising. Some were using the permanent equipment that the government provided in the park. 

Gentlemen were swinging on bars while ladies danced to the gentle tunes of Chinese style music. Small groups were playing hacky sack and a large group stood at a stretching bar. Activity was continuous and you could tell that it was a big social time for everyone as they did their morning exercise activity.

YIKES!

 Over in a corner a group of saxophone players practiced. I’m sure that their playing wasn’t appreciated in their over populated apartment buildings, so they came here to practice.

 Larry especially enjoyed the lady playing the Chinese" guitar" player. Everyone was very friendly with smiles and invitations to participate with them. 

Larry enjoyed playing Chinese ping pong with one gentleman. It was so good to see so many  folks being so active. This was the American LA Fitness…only outside. It was fun to watch!

We walked through the Temple of Heaven Museum....

It had portraits of the Emperors who had used the temple.

 The Temple was sacred ground where the Emperor of China would come to pray for good crops and harvest.

                                        Our group continued on into the Temple of Heaven.  

Sacrifices of pure white lambs and goats were offered to secure good rain and weather for crop growth. In the 1400’s the Temple was built for the Emperor to visit. Although it was destroyed by fire the current Temple was rebuilt in the early 1900’s with it being refurbished about every 15 to 20 years. 

The building has no metal (nails) and is totally wooden. It is a striking structure of Chinese architecture.

                 We enjoyed the morning of nice weather while visiting this Beijing icon.

We headed to a local restaurant, Da Wan Ju, for lunch. Our group enjoyed a combination of chicken, shrimp, beef, pork, glass noodles, fried rice, Jasmine rice, egg plant, Jasmine tea, and many other delights. Everything was very, very spicy, then a dish of Orange Chicken was ordered up with special directions of no hot spices. 

After lunch we headed for a three hour walk around  Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. 

                                       We passed the old train station with the clock tower....

                                                     the old sentry gates into the city....

                                         Nothing had changed here on Tiananmen  Square.

Massive buildings (Congress and 

the National Museum) surrounded the square known for the 1989 demonstration where young protestors were shot down. Howard told us that the exact number shot was never revealed…although the number 40 was tossed around. 

                                        We enjoyed watching the changing of the guards.

                                                                          Mao's Mausoleum

Mao’s transparent tomb rested inside this building and was only open during the morning hours. Larry and I have a vivid memory of standing in line to see him lying inside a glass casket for all to observe. Some today question whether this is a wax figure inside the case.  Howard told us that all Chinese are cremated. Mao was the first to be buried in a casket in this fashion.

On the opposite end of Mao’s tomb, his iconic picture is displayed on the Forbidden City wall. We walked through a long tunnel crossing a very wide street underground to enter the Forbidden City, the largest palace in the world….60 times larger than Buckingham Palace in London and 9 times larger than the Kremlin in Russia. 

It is a huge walled city developed for the Emperor and his staff.The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. For almost 500 years, it served as the home of emperors and their households, as well as the ceremonial and political center of Chinese government. Built between 1406 and 1420 the complex consists of 980 buildings the traditional Chinese palatial architecture has influenced cultural and architectural developments in East Asia and elsewhere. Declared a World Heritage site in 1987 and is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

As we entered the Forbidden City, we noticed that not much had changed here except the amount of people who were visiting here. In 2001, we did not have the crowds that were here today.

The Forbidden City had striking Chinese architecture. We passed through many, many gateways with large structures sitting in front of each gateway. Each time we stepped over a copper or brass 10 by 10 inch high threshold at your feet, it was sort of like stepping in a galley way on a navy ship.

Each building was a Chinese architectural delight!  It went on and on and on….Yellow ceramic tile rooflines with gargoyles lined along the edge indicating the importance of the building. 

                                             The royal red color was prevalent on all buildings. 

Big urns for incense were placed at the entrance of many building and huge caldron pots were placed strategically to seemingly balance the entrance area. Balance was important to them. 

A nice river flowed through the center of the complex providing water in case of fire.

                                                             Howard, our G Adventure guide

Howard told us that the Forbidden City housed the last two Chinese Dynasties. The right to rule is passed on to the Son that the Emperor and Empress produce. A child from a concubine is only used when a royal child is not conceived. One Emperor was known to have 3000 concubines. Whoa! What a horny man!

We walked out of the Forbidden City and took the bus to a local backstreet neighborhood called a hutong. Old, one and two level townhomes were allowed here. Nothing was to tower over the Forbidden City area. Here you would find townhomes without bathrooms. If Mother Nature called, a bucket became handy. A relaxing natural lake rested amongst some budding weeping willow trees.

Lazy boat rides on the lake were available.

                             We passed a old gentleman playing his instrument  on the sidewalk.

Red rickshaws took visitors for rides around the area. We visited a wonderful market with all kinds of tempting, pleasant shops.  Street food smells permeated throughout.

 At the end of the day we shared a couple of local beverages with Suzanne and Sam while listening to a combination of American and Chinese favorites sung by a local group. Larry and I enjoyed tasty chicken stir fry in the hotel for dinner. Another exciting day!

Beijing, China The Great Wall

Monday, March 18, 2019       Beijing and the Great Wall of China

This morning we met in the restaurant for a breakfast buffet and then scurried to the mini-bus at 7:00am. Beijing was in the beginnings of rush hour traffic! We turned the corner and experienced a Chinese car accident. One commuter ran into the side of another and the one that was hit refused to move until the police arrived. We were stuck for about 25 minutes. The facial expressions were our entertainment…loving every minute of our adventure!

                       Chinese car company....BYD...Build Your Dream...What a marketing idea! Blue plates indicate gas driven cars that must adhere to certain days that they can be on the road. Drivers were expected to take public transportation on the non driving days.

Larry and I were in awe all morning at the way Beijing had changed. Signs in English and Mandarin (now the two official languages of The Republic of China). We were here 18 years ago in 2001….  We saw no written English and spoken English was just as rare. To go anywhere, we had to have it written in Mandarin to give to the taxi cab driver….needless to say, we didn’t wonder far from our guide, Dr. Jim, a professor from the University of Kentucky who grew up in Beijing.

Beijing today was neat and clean. Citizens swept the streets as we passed by. There were tons of tall skyscrapers and the hodgepodge of motorbikes, bicycles, scooters, cars, taxis and three wheeled trikes everywhere. They seemed to move smoothly….somehow. Howard told us that 100,000 car accident deaths occur in China in a year….we understood how that could happen with the conglomerate of vehicles merging and horn blowing.

Larry and I surprised at the miles and miles of orchards and trees that lined the highway on the way to the Great Wall. They were definitely not here 18 years ago. Back then we observed undeveloped scrub land with tiny little gardens, sparsely placed throughout the countryside.

We saw the makings of a ew metro train heading along the highway. There was not much development  yet in the areas that the metro/train tracks were heading. The government surely was planning for future expansion north of the city way, way in advance. It was quite interesting to see how advanced this area had become in such a short amount of time.

When we arrived at the Great Wall, our driver dropped us off and we headed into a complex that was brand new. The last time we had visited the Great Wall, the streets were lined with temporary tents, full of merchandise to sell to visitors. Today there were fancy buildings, restaurants, a hotel, two trams to the top of different sections of the Wall, a toboggan ride down the mountain and lots of modern restrooms….still with squat toilets. We were thrilled to witness all the modernization of the entrance and surrounding areas of the Great Wall….and construction was still in progress.

      We rode the tram to the top and then began hiking to the 13^th sentry guard station. 

                                                                 The views were spectacular! 

                                                             The wall was UNBELIEVABLE! 

Several walls were being built as early as the 7^th century BC; these later joined together and made bigger, stronger, and unified are now collectively referred to as the Great Wall. Especially Famous is the wall built between 220-206BC by the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. Little of that wall remains. Since then, the Great Wall has on and off been rebuilt, maintained, and enhanced; the majority of the existing wall was reconstructed during the Ming Dynasty.

                      How did they ever carry all the stones, bricks, and mortar up those mountains? 

Our tickers were thumping pretty good going up and down the steep steps and even steeper walkways along the top of the wall.

                    IT WAS AN INCREDIBLE EXPERIENCE…even for our second time around. 

We took about a thousand pictures as we hiked toward the 20^th sentry guard station before turning around and heading back for the tram on the 14^th sentry guard station. 

We passed through a mammoth amount of shopping stalls…all seemed to have the same merchandize….miniature Buddha’s, trinkets, silk embroidery pictures, and items way too big for our luggage. What a great day at the great wall!

We boarded our minibus at 3:00pm for the two hour ride back to the city. We passed by many villages with  outdoor workout equipment. Apparently the government has put these in each town encouraging villagers to exercise every day. I’m sure this improves the local’s health and helps to keep illness down.  Our group met for a Peking Duck dinner at 6:30pm down the street from our hotel.

 We had another restaurant circular table with stir fried rice, shrimp, pork, chicken, duck, cauliflower, boc choy, tofu, broccoli, duck soup, greens and a peanut appetizer, and a few other items…it is hard to remember everything that passed by on the lazy Susan. The conversation was lively, but it sure got quiet when the food came out. 

We had a wonderful day together and were looking forward to another exciting adventure beginning tomorrow at 9:00am.

              Blossoms were peeking out at the first sight of spring

Hong Kong to Beijing, China

Sunday, March 17, 2019               Happy St. Patrick’s Day    Hong Kong to Beijing, China

The Westerdam arrived into Hong Kong at 4:30am and I got up to see it pulling into the Harbor with all the bright city lights. The ship was surrounded by sky scrapers all lit up! What a site! 

Larry and I walked off the ship at 7:00am with a bus transfer to the Hong Kong Airport. It took us about an hour to pick up our luggage, pass through customs, and find the bus. It really went very smoothly.

Our bus ride literally took us from the old airport that had been converted to a very nice cruise terminal to the new airport about 45 minutes away. We enjoyed the sites along the way. The new airport had been developed on reclaimed land. Larry and I still find this to be an engineering phenomenon….open sea that has been converted to land?  The airport was gigantic.

We had breakfast and waited for our airline, Southern China to open up…around 10:00 am.  We got our bags checked and meandered through immigration again and the China Homeland Security line. Then we started the process of going down about 15 moving walkways to Gate 43….we thought we were never going to get there….this airport is extremely spread out!

                             I enjoyed these two cuties who practiced their English skills on me.

Our 1:15pm flight sat on the runway for close to a half an hour before takeoff. The flight to Beijing was 2 hours and a half. The plane circled the city a couple of times before landing and then it sat on the runway for 45 minutes waiting to get clearance. We finally deboarded and processed through customs again going through double finger printing and picture taking.

Our driver met us at the entrance of the airport with a big Larry and Kay sign. It was so good to see him, but he spoke no English. He had a great translating app. He dropped us at our Hotel around 7:30pm where we met our National Geographic guide, Howard. It is funny how many Chinese we have met with American names. He told us he was given the name in English class. He said, “All the good names like Joe and John were already taken.” HA!

We had a great Chinese dinner with eight of our traveling colleagues…. Sam and Suzanne from Iowa, Farida and Ahmed from Wales, Barbara from Northern Ireland, Carol from Scotland, Willie from Ireland, and Irene from Italy but originally Columbia. What a great group of adventurers! We all devoured beef soup, tofu, chicken, shrimp, broccoli, corn, and a few others items that circled on the Chinese lazy susan several times until everything was gone….must have been a hungry group…actually it all was very tasty. We laughed and had a jolly evening.

We bid each other good night and headed off to the hotel around 9:00pm. What a full of day with plenty of excitement! Tomorrow will be even better ‘cause we are heading for the Great Wall of China!