The Temple of Heaven - Not as close as we thought.

When we first got to our hotel in Beijing, we got this cute little map to show us where things were:

Our hotel was actually called the Holiday Inn - Temple of Heaven. And if you see there at the bottom center of the map, you see our hotel, and then you see the temple of heaven like one block away, right?

Wrong.

We found out this map is crazily condensed. If you see one block on this map, in real life, it's like 30 blocks away. So funny. Beijing is ENORMOUS. Enormous.

So, after we ate some halfway decent Chinese food, off we went to the Temple of Heaven. We never got a really good shot of it, so I got this picture from online:

It is so. dang. pretty. The Temple of Heaven is where the emperor would go to offer sacrifices each winter, and to pray for a good harvest each spring. They had this little rule that the sacrifices had to be killed and prepared at least 200 steps away from the altar, and they wanted to keep the weather from damaging the sacrifices in any way, so they built this thing called the Long Corridor to link the preparation areas to the temple:

I was so amazed. Each beam in this hugely long corridor was painted so beautifully:

I love the blues in the corridor and on the temple itself:

The tour guide said that they made the temple of heaven mainly blue to signify heaven. Red signifies earth, which is why the Forbidden City was all red. Also, in feng shui, heaven is round and earth is square, so temples and pagodas are round, but gates and living areas for earthlings are square.

Again, we couldn't go inside, which is a shame, because from what we could see, it was truly spectacular:

This is called the North Sky Gate:

They have these little spouts to get rid of water when it rains (and when it rains, in this area of China at least, it POURS. It's crazy. I've never seen anything like it. So it's really smart of them to have lots of things to help disperse the water). I think they're so cool:

Yes, Ben was there. :)

I tried to snap at least one pic of him at each place we went. He was our main photographer, which is a good thing. I'm a terrible photographer.

Poor Gagey kept falling asleep like this:

I wish he would have just put his head down in front of him, where it was shady and comfortable. Maybe my hair was tickling him. His little head was exposed to the sun. I felt bad. But he didn't get sunburned. We learned living in this area that the pollution is so heavy, and the altitude is lower than where we're from, so we didn't really ever get sunburned. It was nice not having to slather everyone with sunscreen every day.

This gal took a picture of our family, and then was looking to see how it turned out:

So funny.

After we explored the temple for awhile, our hyper tour guide actually let us play in the adjoining park. Maybe because we had spent like five minutes at each attraction in the morning, we were ahead of schedule? Haha!

So in this park, there are eight really large boulders. Seven of them are carved to resemble mountains. Here's the story. In the Ming dynasty, each emperor was supposed to go to Mount Taishan to pray for his people. It was a hard climb, and one of the emperors got sick of it, so he had his artisans craft 7 boulders to look like little mountains. They represent the seven peaks of Taishan, and apparently, they look just like the seven peaks. So he would just walk to the park and pray there to save the trip to the actual mountain.

Now, like I said, there are actually eight boulders. The Qing Dynasty overthrew the Ming Dynasty. The Qings were Manchurian, and there are eight ethnic Manchurian groups. So one of the Qing emperors decided to add one more boulder to make eight, and to have them represent, not the peaks of Mt. Taishan, but the eight ethnic groups of the Manchurians.

Micah was pissed about something:

He's always pissed about something.

This lady was selling these pretty twirly things. I can't remember what they're called:

So she would kind of dance around with them. It was cool.

We had to wait in the parking lot for a few minutes while our tour guide looked for our bus, and Ben snapped a cute picture of a little Chinese girl. I think it's a great photo: