Today was scheduled to be a purely shopping day, but we instead used the time to visit another Beijing historical site that the trip was not going to touch on, the Temple of Heaven. To get there, we took the subway for the very first time while in Beijing. It was crowded to say the least. No seats were ever available and the subway car was stuffed full of people. My claustrophobia when I have no personal space kept me very uncomfortable for the entire ride, and it was not very fun. This was so different from the DC metro, when outside of rush hour most everyone gets a seat. It was also shocking how cheap the Beijing subway was, only 2 Yuan per one way trip to anywhere. Contrast that with the DC metro which costs at least ten times more.
Once we got to the Temple of Heaven, we saw large groups of people singing, some with song books and some without. We guessed that these large groups of people were singing Chinese folk songs, and that some people knew them by heart. We heard everything from lighthearted tunes to the low, dim communist songs. It was interesting to see so many people join in these groups, though most were old.
The Temple of Heaven itself was amazing, a three story structure mate without nails or screws and painted blue (the color of the heavens). In fact, we were told that all of the imperial buildings that we had been seeing were all built entirely without nails or screws, but the technology had been lost to time. From an engineering perspective, this is an amazing feat. To achieve such elaborate architecture without a staple of modern building is incredibly unbelievable, and yet it’s true. We read signs posted around the courtyard and surrounding the main temple describing all of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the annual ceremony conducted there. The steps that the emperor and the holy men had to go through were as numerous as they were ridiculous. They involved scripted prayers, wine offering, animal sacrifice, more scripted prayers, and lots and lots of incense. The ceremony was supposed to ensure a good crop and a bountiful spring. As ludicrous as this sounds, this was the emperors primary role in interacting with the gods and the heavens. If the crop was not good, that meant that the emperor was losing favor with the heavens and spelt disaster for public support.
Later that day, we visited a large indoor market that had floors specializing in pearls. Apparently pearls could be purchased very cheap there. I personally did not buy any, and spent my time shopping on other floors. Later that day we returned to Wangfujing street to revisit the alley. On the way there we walked into another big shopping area that specialized in carvings and jewelry. Ivory necklaces we extremely cheap, but most everything else in the center I didn’t even risk touching. Everything was expensive and ornate and we enjoyed looking, but eventually left.
We stopped at a Pizza Hut for dinner when we realized that it was going to be extremely hard to reach the acrobatics show that the group had planned to see. We waited impatiently for our food, and ate as fast as we could when it arrived. The tables around us took notice and began to smile and laugh at us, but we cared not. We eventually ran out of the mall and down Wangfujing street back to the subway, and made to the acrobatics show with 5 minutes to spare. It was quite the adventure.
The acrobatics show itself was quite entertaining, though I had seen basically the same exact show in a theatre in North Carolina a few years ago. But it was entertaining nonetheless. I purchased the first bottle of mountain dew I had seen on the entire trip during the intermission and was surprised to find that it tasted very different from the mountain dew I was used to back home. I couldn’t pick out the exact difference, but it tasted incredibly strange.