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Published: September 10th 2009
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CHOCOLATES
Sorry Rob, the dragon ate your chocolates. Hello everybody.
We had our second lesson today, we're getting slightly better at all of the sounds that sound exactly the same to me. In fact, when I repeat the sounds for three different letters in exactly the same way, the teacher seems happy with me, so maybe that's the secret, there aren't as many sounds as they think there are.
After that we went to see the Temple of Heaven - awesome. I should be up with all the details about why it's so famous, and how old it is and how long it took to build, but to be honest, it's just a really cool place to be and see, if you like knowing all the facts and figures...that's what Wikipedia's for...
We're not sure if there's an East Gate to the temple grounds, if there is we missed it, so we had to walk for about 20 minutes to get to the North Gate, where you pay CNY 35 each (about $7.00) to get in and get access to all the buildings too (I think it's CNY 15 each if you just want to see the grounds). The buildings are amazing. Surrounded by terraces of
Walking to the North Gate
Beautiful avenue lined with conifers on the way to the harvest gate white marble, and tiled in the most incredible ceramics, with an awesome shape to them all - circles represented heaven and square/rectangles represented earth. You couldn't actually go inside the buildings but you could have a look inside.
The other awesome thing is that the grounds themselves make up a bit of a meeting place for the Chinese from all over the country - it's just a place they go to spend the day. So along one corridor there are a million people lining the walls dancing, playing cards, singing, playing instruments, pretty much anything you can think of doing. Outside the corridor they are all playing hackysack and inviting us to have a go. It's just really nice. I wish we had gotten there earlier - I think I might go back on a weekend to have a look when it's even more full.
After that both our feet were going to fall off so we just headed home, had a rest for an hour and then went out for some Sichuan dinner...I really love this place. The food is awesome, there's so much of it, and best of all, there is no such thing as table
manners - elbows on the table are the least of your worries! You can just enjoy it, drink you 15litres of beer from the bottle (exaggeration, it's only 1 litre), and then pay the $3.00 to the waiter and go home.
Beijing is fantastic. And now the weather has cleared up and the rain in the last few days seems to have carried off the smog too, so we're just in heaven, even if we're not at the temple anymore (see what I did there? Quite a nifty little ending huh?!)
Hope everybody's well, don't forget to send us messages!!!
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Ipswich
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Chocolates
So the Chocolates get through customs and into the Dragons mouth, but they failed to get onto my desk and into my rumbling belly? Not very fair if you ask me.