The Alter of Heaven
Trip Start
Aug 10, 2007
1
8
92
Trip End
Dec 27, 2007
Beijing,
China
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
We found a market and bought some sweet bread, tomatoe, cucumber and some cold meats. We bought a junk of Beijing duck for dinner and then we did a quick journey on a tuk tuk to the temple.
The temple is in a huge park, with the central area being the Alter of Heaven. Without boring you with the details, the temple is considered to be China's most impressive architectural building. It is amazing and there were fewer tourits, so all good
Alter of Heaven
. We left the temple to go the Hong Qiao market across the road. This is an aggressive market - you bater hard and the sellers get physical if need be, let me explain ...... on the 2nd floor are shoes, so naturally that is our number one aim! We started walking past counters and the sellers are doing their thing, "hellow boy, hellow lady, lookie my nice shoes" so we keep moving. I see a north face sleeveless jacquet and so stop to look, then begin to move on, oh no siree, someone pulls my by my backpack (my small day backpack) and I can't move. I had to actually pull hard to get loose. I go to find Jules and she is heading for the ground floor with a red face. Her expierence was being pulled by both arms, from two different sellers and she had to shout at them to ger them to leave her alone! I was more shocked by the fact that shoe shopping was over ..... a little tug of war seems to be the cure for shoe stopping. And later we learned from a German couple that they had had a similar expierence.
The ground floor was much better behaved, and we purchased a few items.
On the way back to the hostel we stopped in to the New Beijing Shopping centre. It has a huge ice rink on the basement level, with all the floors having their centre open, so you can stand and look down to watch the skating. We looked around and then I read my book inside Starbucks, having a 'Snoozy' Mango passion fruit Frescato, while Jules went for a quick shop. 90 minutes later we were headed home and starting to feel the Great Wall hike in our muscles .
