wednesday

in the morning we went to the temple of heaven, where the emperor used to come to make sacrifices and pray to heaven for a good harvest and general well being. now, of course, the temple is no longer a religious site, since its religious importance was derived from its relationship to the emperor. so today it is a public park.

but the interesting thing about the temple of heaven is that it really is used by the public. one thing we've noticed and have been talking about as a part of the class is the extent to which exercise is public in china in a way it is not in the united states. you'll walk out to catch a taxi at 9 at night, and you'll see older people doing tai chi on the side walk. there are also parks that look like playgrounds, but they are very different in one big way from american playgrounds. check out this video i took to see how these chinese playgrounds are different.



so yeah. all the people at the playground-type-thing were adults. there were large groups of people waltzing as a form of exercise. there were people singing and playing instruments. parks in china do not have the same uses that parks in the US have. most people wouldn't think of going to their neighborhood park and working out like the people in the video above are.

see, there would be pretty green paths like this one that look just like a us park. the only difference is that along the way you'll run across some dude going like this and some crazy american tourist obnoxiously taking a picture of him.


of course, the park is also an important historical site, and i took some pictures of the buildings.

but for whatever reason, despite the fact that i saved this post, the pictures didn't save, and there's no way i'm uploading them again. my computer said that the internet at the beijing hotel was 10 mpbs, and it says this one is 100 mpbs, but it is taking way slower for whatever reason. so i've taken some pics of interesting stuff, but it just takes way too long to upload them. seriously. like we're talking about maybe 10 minutes to upload 4 pictures. it's crazy. so no more of that.

anyway, so the temple of heaven was interesting. after that, we visited the practice facilities of the beijing tigers, a professional baseball team. baseball is not very big in china, as was evident from their field - not a lot of room for fans. there was also an american on the team. he was from pennsylvania and played baseball in college for vanderbilt. he's using his position on the tigers to get to see another country and to maybe get some experience that would allow him to work in the front office of a us major league team. when we got back, some of us went off to dinner and wandered the streets of beijing. that was last wednesday.

it was right near a velodrome and the olympic field hockey stadium. we got to ask their manager questions.