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Published: November 2nd 2010
Heaven, Summer, Scorpions...
The Temple of Heaven After a nice breakfast and a coffee we set off for the Temple of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven is where the Emperor would go to worship Heaven and perform ceremonies, specifically ceremonies related to the harvest. The buildings were really beautiful as you will see in the pictures. At one of the farther buildings there was a door built for a very old Emperor. He was 70 years old and walking around the grounds was very tiring for him so he got people to make a door for him to one of the temples that shortened the distance between one of the entrances and the temple. The door is appropriately called the 70 year old door. This was because he didn’t want his sons to become lazy and use this door so he issued a decree stating, “From now on only he among my offspring could enter and exit by this door who has reached the age of 70 years old.” It turns that he was the only Emperor who ever reached the age 70 and therefore he was the only one who ever used that door. The Temple of
Heaven is really just a massive garden with about 5 temples interspersed throughout it. The gardens are beautiful and really big so it was a big walk but really worth it!
The Summer Palace The Summer Palace was where the Emperor and his family would retreat in the summer. It was maybe the most beautiful place we saw in Beijing. It is built on a very large piece of land with a hill in the middle and a lake at the bottom of the hill. The temples are all built into the hill, it really is quite stunning. There is also a little stream that runs through the grounds and has been built into a little shopping lane. Throughout the grounds are many stone paths that are flanked on either side by stone mosaics but there are miles and miles of trails so just imagining the time it would take to create those mosaics is astounding. While we were looking at the biggest most beautiful building we walked by a tour group and walking with them were two of my university dorm mates, Alice and Daniel! I mean, people always say it’s a small world, but really?
Really? And it turns out they are also teaching in Korea, haha! What are the chances? The Summer Palace was one of our favourite places just because it was so beautiful! If we were to go back we would definitely spend a full day exploring the area. It was just too big to see everything! In the end we stayed until closing time, around dusk, and then took off for Wangfujing Market.
Wangfujing Market Wow, so Wangfujing Market was the craziest market I have ever been too. It was actually quite small, but packed inside was a touristy shopping street, two food streets with male cross dressing singers as entertainment, and a street full of really weird food. Within the first few feet of entering the market the first stand we saw had live scorpions skewered on a stick. Yummy! As we walked through we saw tarantulas, centipedes, dried turtles, big black scorpions, crickets, seahorses, and starfish all ready to fry and eat. Who’s hungry? We ducked away from the scary food and spent some time buying some souvenirs. I bought a nice Chinese bell for above a door, some post cards, and a set of terracotta
statues. Scott wasn’t really interested in much there. Then we went back into the main street and I got up the nerve to eat a scorpion. I hope you checked out the video. It tasted pretty bad. I thought that maybe it would taste a bit like eating a lobster or crab but it turns out that scorpion claws don’t have any meat in them; they are just crunchy gross exoskeleton. Not delicious. This was unlike the little Chinese restaurant we went to after we left Wangfujing. We had an excellent meal of fried chicken, fried rice, and snow pea shoots. So yummy! Then at about 10:45pm we went into the subway and luckily we caught the last train to our hotel. Pretty great day!
Stay tuned for the Great Wall!
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quan xie
rachel, i expected you to say it tastes like chicken. i looked up scorpion as used in tcm - good for wind and extremely toxic. any truth there?