Day 2 begins with a trip to Jingshan Park in the center of Beijing. The park includes a large hill with temples at the top. On a clear day, all of Beijing can be seen, in every direction. It wasn’t clear today, a combination of mist (there have been hints of rain and clouds), and pollution. There are several areas where people are dancing, and enjoying the comfortable morning air. We also found an area with about 40 singers, a keyboard player, and a conductor, singing folk songs. We’ve heard impromptu singing groups around town like this before, but none were quite this good.
Our next stop is the “Disappearing Hutongs” tour. This is a specialty of Stretch-a-Leg Travel, and the reason they were featured on CBS Sunday Morning in May 2013. The brief (4 minutes) feature can be found at their website: www.stretchaleg.com.
Jonathan walks us through some narrow back streets, discussing what used to be courtyard style homes, built for one family. Since 1949 and Mao’s rule, the courtyards now have has many as 50 families, crowded into small rooms constructed inside the original structure, most with no running water. Besides describing the evolution of the hutongs, Jonathan shows us some places where the original buildings walls and roofs are still in place.
Lunchtime is at “Lost Heaven”. They specialize in Yunnan style cooking. We’re getting a visual, as well as “foodie” tour of Beijing. The fruit plate at the end of the meal is really creative. The building is in the Legation Quarter, at the site of the old US Embassy.
After lunch, we tour the Lama Temple, the largest active Buddhist temple in Beijing. It contains a huge Buddha, and many small temples offering worship and incense burning sites. A few blocks away, we walk through the Confucius Temple, another important site for the Chinese emperors hundreds of years ago. Our last tour stop is the Drum Tower (of course, with Brad and Glenda along). It’s a tall tower, centrally located in Beijing, with huge drums used to signal different times of the day.
We have the driver drop us at the apartment. We tour the kids around, and then order pizza from Kro’s Nest. It’s a relaxing evening catching up on activities back in DFW, and talking about Beijing, now that they’ve seen it.