Island Time: Goodbye Beijing!

It’s the last day in Beijing. It is sort of bittersweet--I mean I would love to see more of this city, but the smog is beginning to hurt my throat. Daniel found out that someone in another group had an asthma attack and had to go home. The pollution is quite rough.

Birds Nest Stadium...in the smog.
It was actually across the street when this pic was taken.

Today we are going to spend the morning at the Temple of Heaven park. It is Saturday morning and everyone gathers in the park to exercise. It’s not like anything you see in NC. People here are actually exercising! When you enter the park, there is a group of women (about 30 or so) line dancing to a Lady Gaga song in Chinese. Then on further down, there is what looks like a playground but it’s actually machines for adults to exercise on--and they are full! Here we met a the most flexible guy I have ever seen.

There are people playing hacky sack with something that looks like a badminton shuttlecock except it has huge feathers on it. People are also playing badminton. There are some parents out walking their children in strollers, some are just walking, some are jogging. We pass a huge group doing traditional Tibetan Dance. A small group were doing some Tai Chi and a lovely woman was doing some sort of traditional Chinese dancing and got two of our members involved. It was quite cute!

We then headed up to the temple or alter itself. This is where the emperors would come to pray for a good harvest. It was beautiful! We circled around it taking pictures and enjoying the view of the city. On a clear day (if there ever was one) you could see the Forbidden City and Summer Palace. It wasn’t that clear for us.

We met back toward the entrance to the park to do some exercising of our own. A tai chi master had agreed to give us a lesson that morning. As we all lined up, he gave us a beautiful demonstration. However I noticed right away, it was not the tai chi I had been taught! He began to attempt to instruct us, as which point a many Chinese tourists found it amusing to watch us and take some pictures. We said to Daniel, “They're laughing at us, aren’t they.” In his cute but patronizing way, he said “No,no. They are just jealous and want to join too!” Yeah, they were laughing at us.

We posed for pictures with the master afterwards and headed back down to the bus. We had a plane to catch for Xi’an. Goodbye for now to Beijing. I do hope I come back one day.

If you want to see more pictures of Beijing, click here.