Dear friends, If you receive this blog twice - I'm sorry for that because something went partly wrong the first time. Love Monkey and Bear [View Full Entry]

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Summary: I took these pictures of the burning sky this morning around 08.00 near our home in Roden. Love Monkey and Bear [View Full Entry]

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Summary: Today is our last full day in Beijing. And we are going to make a great day of it. Li Peng picked us up at our hotel at 08.30. The first visit today are the Fragant Hills again. This magnificent mountain area is great to visit and there are lots of things to do and to see. You have to make choices here. So we decided to go to the Temple of Azure Clouds in Chinese the Biyun Si. The temple is a striking building and it is dominated by a bulbous dagoba and topped by extraordinary conical stupas. The [View Full Entry]

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Summary: Our next visit today are the Botanical Gardens. These gardens are very huge and about the largest in the world. We don't spent much time here now, but you have to enter the Botanical Gardens first before you can visit the Wofo Si Temple. This temple is housing a huge reclining Buddha, over 5 metres in length and cast in copper. By the way: the largest reclining Buddha of the world you find in Bangkok in the Wat Pho - 46 metres long. This reclining Buddha - also called here the sleeping Buddha - lies here calm in repose, with [View Full Entry]

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Summary: Our last night in Beijing are we spending in the only real Peking Duck restaurant of Beijing. After parking the car we have to stroll through lots of hutongs which are complete broken down. After strolling for about 20 minutes through mud, watersplashes and sand, we arrive at the restaurant. Hidden in a very old hutong. Lots of people were waiting outside for a table (you cannot make reservations here), but Li went inside and arranged a table within 10 minutes. Li ordered a peking duck diner, not a set dinner, but he arranged the dinner completly by himself. And [View Full Entry]

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Summary: On our way to the Shang Fang National Forest and Nature reserve we saw lots of local famers harvest the corn from the fields. Everybody is working on the fields and on the STREETS during this very busy time. After the corn is picked of the fields, the 'streetworkers' - mostly women and kids - put the corn on the streets, on the roofs of the houses, in the trees and so on to let these corn dry. The pictuctures we made give you an impression of how it works. After we find our way to Shang Fang we enter [View Full Entry]

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Summary: The Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian is a World Heritage Site. It lies about 45 km Southwest of the capital Beijing in a beautiful natural surrounding. In 1920 scientific workers found the first remains of Sinanthropus pekinensis, who lived in the Middle Pleistocene, along with various objects, and remains of Homo sapiens dating far back as 18.000 - 11.000 B.C. The Peking Man Site is not only an exceptional reminder of the prehistorical human societies of Asian continent, but it also illustrates the process of evolution. Besides the many caves you can visit here, there is also a [View Full Entry]

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Summary: After our visit to the White Cloud Taoist Temple we have enough time to visit the Temple of Heaven. It's after three o'clock so the sun and the light is great for making pictures. We enter the Temple of Heaven from the North Gate, it's usual to start your round trip from the South Gate. But due to traffic jam it's now more easy to start from the North and during our visit Li drives his car to the South Gate. The Temple of Heaven, the Tian Tan, where emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties held the ceremonies of [View Full Entry]

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Summary: In China there are several very old kinds of worshipping: Buddhism. Confucianism and Taoism. Now we visit the oldest and most famous Taoism Temple in Beijng. The Baiyun Guan Temple, in English The White Cloud Temple, is the headquarters of the Taoists. Human model themselves on earth earth on heaven heaven on the way and the way on that which is naturally so Lao Zi"- from the Daodejing Taoism is a religion deriving from the Daodejing or "Way of Power", an obscure and mystical text compromising the teachings of the semi-mythical Lao Zi, who lived around 500 BC. Taoism is [View Full Entry]

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Summary: We start our discoverytour in Beihai Park from the westgate. Almost half the park is a lake and in winter is this a great and favourite spot for iceskating. At the moment it seems that iceskating is far away because the temperture is today around 28 degrees celcius. But next month the temperture in Beijing is falling down very quickly. This park supposedly created by Kublai Khan and created long before the Forbidden City was built. The huge lake was man-made and the island in the middle of the lake was created with the excavated earth. Emperor Qianlong created the [View Full Entry]

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