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Tuesday, March 30 - Beijing
We woke up to a chorus of soldiers shouting calisthenics cheers and running around in Hua Du hotel front parking lot outside our 6th floor window. We were ready to get up at 6am anyway and down to breakfast at shortly after 7. Tour groups were just getting to the breakfast room along with several monks and Chinese businessmen.
A young Chinese woman asked to share our table for 4, so we worked at communicating, she practicing her English and we experimenting with Chinese. She works for a tour company and was improving her English before the 2008 Olympics, she said. She was very refreshing and open.
We took a taxi to Beihai Park, only about $3 for a 5 mile ride. Bob’s walking tour downloaded from Frommer’s Beijing was a good introduction to touring in China.
At about 10AM we entered the park with a small crowd of Chinese tourists. We stuck out enough to attract a fair number of hawkers offering their private tours, to sell us their post cards and very tenaciously in some cases to try to separate us from our Yuan. Later in the afternoon we saw a few more ‘European’ folk, mostly in tour groups, and many tours of Chinese of all ages enjoying their parks. We found Beihai (and later on the smaller Jingshan Park) to be well maintained and beautifully laid out. 2/3 of Beihai was covered by a manmade lake so we saw lots of water and the wind blowing across it was chilly.
The garden designs emphasized rock sculpture with cunning paths and lots of naturalized stairs climbing to the top of manmade hills.
Although we climbed to the summit of the Jade Island hill to see the White Dagoba, built in 1651 in honor of a visit by the Dalai Lama, the line to climb 118 feet to the top of the Dagoba was too daunting.
So we crossed the street to Jingshan Park (coal hill which was made of the dirt from the excavation for the Forbidden City to the South). In both parks we saw historical and religious artifacts, but clearly many religious items had been lost or destroyed in military or social upheaval. Many missing Buddhas were blamed on the Allied 8 powers in 1900. After climbing the peak to see the Pavilion of Eternal Spring and a 360 degree view of Beijing we wound our way past the tree in which an Emperor had hung himself and crossed the street in front of the Forbidden City where we caught another cab and headed back to the hotel. Dinner at the Full Moon Cantonese Restaurant in the Hotel was O.K. but we need to adjust to smoking around us at meals. Food was not as described on the menu which after our lunch experience seems to be a pattern.
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