Pandas, Pagodas, and Hutongs
Today was a pretty full day. It started out with a bike ride around the neighborhood alleyways (hutongs), including a stop at an exercise park on a large lake. Most of the people there were older, but seemed to be in great shape. There were various exercise machines, as well as some gymnastic equipment, and a 60 year old man showed me how he could do some pretty impressive stuff on the horizontal and parallel bars. We also tried some Tai Chi, and played some type of game involving something that looked like a haky sack with feathers. My fellow bikers were Jon from the hostel, and Tu, a Chinese-American girl from Boston. After the ride,Tu and I went to look at the Temple of Heaven. Compared to the Forbidden City, this was much more sedate, and really beautiful. The temple was built around the early 1500’s as a place for the Emperor to worship, and consists of several round buildings with umbrella-shaped roofs. A lot of the buildings, steps, etc. were arranged in groups of 9, which is the most sacred number to the Chinese.
Tu can speak Chinese, and this was a great help in navigating around the city. I also used my GPS on the IPhone quite a bit, which worked really well. After the temple, we took the subway up to the Beijing Zoo,which was actually a bit more complicated than I had thought. The subways here are really clean and well organized. There is an electric display in all the cars showing your present location – there are even flat screen TV’s to watch if you get bored. The zoo’s main attraction was of course the pandas. This zoo was the first to artificially inseminate and rear pandas and has a huge exhibit to display them. Apparently they need to eat 15 hours a day, since their diet consists entirely of bamboo, and they were busy doing this when we saw them. Since they are only found in China, the zoo also donates pandas to other zoos around the world as a good will gesture. When we returned to the hostel, I said goodbye to Tu, who was taking a train down to Xian. One more day in Beijing – I hope to see the Summer Palace and the acrobatics show tomorrow.
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