Oct 17 Fri. Shopping and Temple of Heaven

Chuck has Friday, Saturday and Sunday to go exploring with me, so I try to do things on those days that he will enjoy.

He had a lovely cashmere sweater made in Shanghai and wants to get another. I had found a shop and he chose his color and they measured him (several times) and then measured his sweater and finally took our deposit. We pick it up the day before we leave.

Then we walked over to Wangfujing, which is the major shopping street. I had found a really nice upscale food court in a high end department store.

I have been joking that the Chinese beds are a sheet on a marble slab. I was flabbergasted to find out that I was actually right. This is a bed made with glass bricks.

This one is the marble slab. These were very expensive and I think had a heating element in them.

We had dim sum for lunch and then went across the street for Hagen Daz for dessert.


Our next stop was the Temple of Heaven Park. The emperor made sacrifices here for good harvest. There was a very elaborate ceremony which involved many buildings and thousands of courtiers watching.

This was the "long corridor". Each of these clumps of people was a card game with on lookers. They all had bags of snacks with them.

Chuck and I actually came in from the East gate instead of the South gate where the emperor would have started. So we were looking at things in reverse order.

This is the Hall of Prayer for good harvests:
This was the building with memorial tablets. We decided that we didn't need to stand in a huge line, pressed together with our new best friends to catch a glimpse of something which we didn't understand.
This was the circular mound altar. If you stand on the raised stone in the center and speak the acoustics make it sound as if you are speaking to heaven.

On the way out were 2 rows of drums made of flowers with the Olympic icons on them.

The marathon blue line came through here, too.

We had invited Yuan and Xiaoyan for dinner. (With our usual thing - they chose the restaurant and the food and we paid.)

They chose one called WaHaHa that had food from Xiaoyan's home area in the southern part of China. She is pregnant and has a hard time finding food that is appealing. Tastes of home are good and she really ate quite a bit.

We started with little fried fishies:

and pickled daicon radish.
Then we had salad,
peas with mushrooms,

meat inside the fried wrappers,

spare ribs with sticky rice in the foil package:

duck cooked in a different style,
gifilte fish soup?
sweet and sour fish,
and watermelon, apples and tomatoes for dessert.

We were given a coupon for 100 RMB off on our next visit. (And I can guarantee that there will be another visit.)

We had walked to the restaurant (30 minutes) because at dinner time taxis are impossible to find on campus, but we took a taxi home.