Seaweed Soup

Today we had seaweed soup for lunch.

I went for a walk early this morning and met a little old Chinese man jogging along. He said hello and I replied, he then broke out into a torrent of Chinese, which I couldn't understand, all the time pointing to my feet. It finally hit me that he was amused by my bare toes, everyone else was wearing covered shoes, I did say it was cold.

First stop today was Tiananmen Square. It was very welcome as it is very cold here. Vicki was very kind and lent me her coat as I had come without mine, well when I went ealking with bare toes it wasn't too bad. I wasn't sure how I would feel here but it was OK. We had some time to walk around and then met to have a group photo taken. I am happy to be able to have a photo of the whole group to remember them by. I also got Anne from Western Australia to take my picture in the pose that all the Chinese were having theirs taken!


The Forbidden City was incredible although we didn't see much inside the buildings. Our guide Richard told us many stories from ancient times, and believe me I wouldn't last long as a concubine, I would become very badly behaved. Everything here is being done up ready for the Beijing Olympics so the Forbidden City had scaffolding and "photos" of some of the buildings. There is such a lot of building going on, I wonder if it will all be finished by next year. The traffic is pretty horrendous as well. I think there will be restrictions on residents when the Olympics are staged otherwise it will be impossible to get around.

After lunch we went to the Temple of Heaven, the Temple was built in 1420 A.D. during the Ming Dynasty to offer sacrifice to Heaven. As the Emperor of China was regarded as the "Son of Heaven", sacrifices to heaven was extremely important. The temple was built for these ceremonies, mostly comprised of prayers for good harvests.