Beijing Part 4 - The Temple of Heaven

The Temple of Heaven is a Buddhist temple that has had a long history of being rebuilt.

Mostly, it's just pretty. There is a huge park surrounding it. Every morning it's packed full of people, mostly retired age, exercising and dancing. It's awesome. The you have people singing amateur opera, gambling, and playing bridge.

Here's a short clip of the various things we saw.



Here are the buildings we saw there.

 Doing their exercises with poles.

 Tai qi.

 One of the walkways.

 Temple of Heaven

 The patterns.

 The colors were the most beautiful blues and greens. I think they are my sister's favorite colors.

 The Beijing smog. It's like a really bad Utah inversion, but it never goes away.

 Proof we were there.

 Ceiling patterns.

 My sister-in-law played this game with this guy. We bought a set. It's kind of like lacrosse but with a sweeping motion and you stand pretty close together. The really good people do it with two paddles each and use some of the Tai Qi moves to transfer the ball. It was cool.

 A blue ceramic dragon.

 Carved posts around where a temple use to stand.

Those brushes are used to do Hanzi (the chinese characters) with water on the ground. This girl was playing with her grandpa's brushes. It was cute. It's a fine are to be able to write these characters well. We used to have something like this in the states. It was called penmanship. But that's a lost art.

And then we have  - Singing for Mao. We heard this music from 30 yards away. A huge group of people making an ipromptu choir. Their song was something about the greatness of Chairman Mao.
Creepy.