After a couple of fast paced tour days, we decided to take it a bit slower. We took a leisurely morning to relax. There happened to be a History Channel special on the building of the Great Wall of China. Since we'd just seen it the other day, it seemed quite interesting and we hung around and watched it. As it got closer to lunch, we packed our bags and checked out of our room since we'd be sleeping on the train to Xi'an that night.
We'd been having mixed luck with the restaurant in the hotel. They had wonderful food, but they didn't have a children's portion to the menu and when we tried to special order things like "Fried Chicken" we got this very nice Wok fried chicken and vegetable dish spiced heavily with Ginger. Not exactly kid stuff and William wasn't impressed. Today, we elected not to eat at the hotel, but venture out toward the Temple of Heaven and find something to eat that William might like. We were living on the edge! As we got out of the cab and looked around, we spotted...
A KFC! It's a restaurant that is William and Dad approved! We've been dabbling in Chinese food for three days to this point. We needed something familiar.
The Temple of Heaven was a much more relaxed site to see than the ones we'd seen so far. It might be that we were finely into the work week and the crowds were less, but it also was the park like setting of the whole place. It was as full of trees and flowers and neatly groomed as any great city park, but with stunning Chinese temples and palaces spread around in the different places.
It was just a very relaxed place. Most everyone we saw there was sitting back and relaxing, talking, or playing games. I almost felt silly pointing the camera around like a madman trying to capture it all.
Honestly, they were playing games.
We rented an audio tour device for William. We've found that he stays far more engaged with the site seeing (and isn't running around and rolling his Thomas train on everything), if he has one of these things and he is pretty good at telling us the highlights from the recording. We do get some odd looks when we get just one and we give it to the six year old, but it works for us.
Once again, William is the center of attention most everywhere he goes and he is still happily posing for pictures with completely foreign strangers.
The glazed tile roofs are intricate and marvelous.
Whenever William would get close to a new site of interest, his audio tour would start talking about the item. He'd pipe up with, "It's talking again!"
The weather was really good on this day. As you could see from the previous day's pictures, it is usually quite hazy in Beijing and even in the Forbidden City, the buildings just across the courtyard were in the haze. On this day, it had totally cleared out and you could see out across the city without any haze. Wow!
Thomas made the rounds in the Temple of Heaven too.
We'd seen what looked like a playground along the entrance to the park. William had wanted to play, but we convinced him to do some site seeing first and then do the playground later. We had such a wonderful time in the park, that we'd forgotten about it until we were exiting. We headed over and were a bit startled with what we found. It wasn't a children's playground, but rather a grown-up's work-out area. William still found some things to play on, but Caroline and I were just amazed with the set-up and even more amazed at how many Chinese were out there really using them.
After the park, we headed back to the hotel for dinner. Oddly enough, they figured out that they did have a children's menu. It just took a little extra prodding and asking. Then, we were picked up and taken to the train station where we boarded our sleeper car on our overnight train and spent the night snoozing as we traveled to Xi'an some 600 miles away. William, who loves trains, proclaimed this as the BEST day of his LIFE! In the morning, we disembark to go see the Xi'an city wall and the famous Tera Cotta Warriors!
Some sites around the Temple of Heaven including people playing cards and people playing hackie sac with an odd shuttle cock type device. William received one from one an Army guy that was relaxing in the park. Later, we are driving to the train station and passing Tiananmen Square and then finally getting on the train.
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