The Temple of Heaven
Seeing as we arrived on the weekend, we took advantage of this morning to drop off our passports to the Vietnamese Embassy to get our visa put in. We couldn’t get it before we left OZ, as it would have expired before we even reached Vietnam, so unfortunately we had to do it here.
From there we headed to Tiananmen Square, which to be honest we both found a little disappointing. It wasn’t until we went to The Gate of Heavenly Peace (15Y ea) & were able to look over Tiananmen Square & look at the pictures on display of past historical events there (everything was written in Chinese, so all you could do was look at the pretty pictures) that we appreciated it a little more. Getting into the Gate of Heavenly Peace was interesting though, first we had to deposit our bags at the luggage area for 4Y (not bad for 2 bags) & then we had to join a queue to go through a security check. My patting down consisted of the woman feeling one of my front pockets, which I think was much the same for all the women, but the queue that Geoff was in, the guy was giving all the guys a full on pat down, front & back. My security check 1 min, with a queue, Geoff’s 13 minutes, with a queue. The view from the top is supposed to be quite nice, but I am not sure when you would see it, we were just above the square (Tiananmen Square) & we couldn’t even see all of it. Oh, we didn’t see Mao in state, the memorial hall is closed Mondays.
It started to rain as we headed to The Temple of Heaven & the rain never really let up for the rest of the day. The Temple of Heaven was actually quite nice, we weren’t too sure what it would be like, but it was quite nice. Very quirky in a way because all of the temples are circular. It took us about 4 hours to look around & we didn’t look at everything. We bought a through ticket 35Y ea + a Guide to the temple of Heaven 10Y (only got one). The guide is basically just a big map & some blurbs about the buildings + some convoluted explanation about the area. It’s quite nice really, would be nice to frame actually.
After all that we headed back to our hotel, stopping on the way to get some food for dinner - WOW, what an experience that turned out to be. I might have to do a totally new post for that one.