Day 2....

Very busy day today... We' ve been to a lot of interesting places.

I woke up this morning and the glance out of the window made me feel a lot better - it was raining and there was no sun... everything was so gloomy! Very promissing! So, after a quick breakfast, we ventured out of the hotel again...

The first place we visited was the Lama Temple which is the most renowned Tibetan Buddhist temple outside Tibet. I was very touched as this was the first such temple I have ever visited and I must say that I really liked it despite its (to our European eyes) kitch-like appearance. It basically contains several small rooms (kiosks) in which you can admire numerous statues of Buddha of various sizes as well as other statues, everything richly coloured. Astonishing combination of colours. Outside the kiosks people were burning incense, thousands of perfumed sticks were being burnt. Needless to say that the smell was very intense and almost made me sick. Anyway, people were really praying in these little temples which gave the visit a serious touch. They burn these sticks the same way as we burn candles. I will write more on this later. Maybe I should mention a 26metres high statue of Buddha which we saw in one of the temples - it apparently made it to the Guiness Book of Records!! Gee it was huge!

Upon exiting the Lama Temple (a bit sick to the stomach, due to the heavy smell), we went to a place called "Prince Gong Residence" which was supposed to be a palace surrounded by a park. We visited the park and never get inside the living area as it seemed quite closed - some doors were, indeed, open to the public but you could not get inside, you had to admire things from the outside (older furniture, carpets, nothing really extraordinary). However, the park was nice, it had a small lake in the middle with golden fish, little rocks strangely arranged, etc. Very croweded, apparently very popular with Chinese tourists.

We then decided to make a tour of the hutong, the City's traditional alleyways. So we found a Chinese man that had one of those 3 wheel vehicles called rickshaws (or, should I better say, he found us!) who, for RMB 300 (approximately EUR 30), drove us for around 2 1/2 hours through the charming narrow residential streets. The journey included visits (additionally paid for, of course) to the inside of a traditional Chinese house, the Bell Tour and the Drum Tour and the former residence of the widow of Sun Yatsen, a revolutionary who set the basis of the People's Republic of China. It was very interesting to see all these narrow streets, with hundreds of little shops and amazing merchandise. People continued to stare at us, I noticed very few tourists (or was it the effect of the Chinese being so many!!). Copies of Mao's little red book continued to the thrown at us in an obviously failed attempt to make us buy it... But, all in all, it was quite an interesting experience.

After the visit to the hutong, we went to the famous (or so I'm told) Temple of Heaven which is located in the centre of very large and beautiful park and quite close to our hotel. This was the place where the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties used to worship heaven and pray for rich crops. Unfortunately, as we got there quite late (around 6pm), only the park was still open to the public, the temple had already been closed. So we just took a rather short walk through the park as it started to rain again and promised ourselves another visit (hopefully more successful!) on Thursday.

As we were already a bit tired of Chinese cuisine, we decided to go to Pizza Hut this evening. Neither of us had had pizza in quite a while so we were in the mood for a pizza treat. After queuing for approximately 10mins outside the restaurant, we were allowed inside and led to a table (in the well known Pizza Hut trandition). The waiters hardly spoke a word of English so I gave up the idea of explaining how I wanted the Super Supreme to be adjusted - after my recipe, the pork should be replaced by chicken and a corn topping should be added. So I settled for the standard Super Supreme which was quite good actually...

As I said, it has been quite a full day... Very early tomorrow morning (7.30) we are off to the Great Wall. I hope it will be fun and the weather will be great (even though I don't know what "great" should mean anymore...)

Early night tonight so.... goodnight!!