We tried to sleep in some this morning, but with the time difference it was still early when I woke up, around 6:00 AM, which I thought was good for me, I had expected to wake up much earlier.the
There was a small coffee machine in the room with pods, so I used some bottled water and made a cup of coffee. There were two choices for pods, and I thought one was decaf because of its color, so I picked the other. They were color coded and had descriptions in Chinese as well as in English. I first ran some water through the machine to flush it out in case someone had used tap water in it previously. It was not a good coffee at all, it was really strong even though I had used the large cup serving size on the machine, not the smaller espresso selection. I sipped on it, but did not drink much.
I started on the blog, we are woefully behind on it, not having done much since we arrived, just a few minutes worth yesterday before I realized I was way too tired to do much writing
I did not get that far before Stephanie was awake and we decided to go to the buffet in the lobby for breakfast, we were hungry.
We got dressed and headed to the buffet. First, we looked at the serving stations to see what they had. There was traditional Western breakfast foods, eggs, bacon, sausage and fried eggs. There were also some items that we assumed were more traditional Chinese breakfast items.
We decided to eat there, we really had no other choice. They scanned our room card back out at the entrance and took us to a table. We were not seated long when the server came back to tell us that we did not have breakfast included in our room rate, which we knew, so we had to sign a receipt for it to be charged to the room. We also knew it was a bit pricy, the equivalent of $40.00 per person, but what other choice did we have?
We got our food and ordered breakfast tea to drink. I was not sure how the coffee machine they were using would work, specifically, was the water they were using purified and/or heated enough to make it drinkable. Tea is usually made from boiling water, so we ordered that thinking it might be safer, we had to have something to drink.
The food was not bad, but once again, suffered from not being warm enough, especially the fried eggs, which were all premade and sitting in a large “pile” under a heat lamp. Most were cooked hard, but there were some over-easy eggs off to the side from the main “pile”.
After we had gotten our food, I did see a sign on the food station where the eggs were, which was right by our table, that you could also order scrambled eggs and omelets, so I suppose you could also order a fresh fried egg if you were willing to wait. We think that the breakfast will be included when we are on the Viking hotel time, so we will have time to figure it out, we should have three breakfasts during that time here with Viking.
After breakfast, we headed back up to the room to make our plan for the day. We had decided earlier that we would first go to Mass at a nearby Catholic Church, just a few minutes away by taxi. We had researched it online and there was supposed to be an English language Mass at 10:30 AM. We had been up early enough to go for the 8:00 AM Mass, but is was listed as being in Chinese.
We put on some nicer clothes and went to the lobby at 10:00 AM to have them call us a taxi. We were not sure how long it would take for the taxi to arrive, so we went early to make sure we arrived at Mass on time.
The concierge actually just used Didi to call us a ride, and apparently, used the car service option versus the taxi option. We did not know that until our car arrived and it was a nice fancy car. Apparently, he had called a premium ride share car instead of a taxi, or lower class car, which was fine, but it cost more. We prepaid 30.00 yuan for the ride with our Alipay, scanning the QR code for payment. That was about $3.80, so while it seems to be a large amount more in Chinese money, it is not much difference in US dollars.
We arrived at the church about 5 minutes before Mass was scheduled to start, and headed inside. Oops, Mass was already started, and it was in Chinese, not English. A lady usher helped us, and said there was no English Mass here, it was at another church, and this Mass had started at 10:00 AM. We just took a seat on the side near the back of the church.
Stephanie tried to use one of our translate apps to translate the homily, it worked well at times, but would not stay on continuously, only for about 20 seconds at a time, and then we had to hit the microphone button again to start a fresh translate session.
There were a lot of people in the church, and there was a special presentation by the children during the Mass. We had wished we were there for the full Mass, but we could only rely on the information we could find online and it was obviously dated and no longer correct, but we had tried.
After Mass, Stephanie talked with another lady usher, they were all wearing a type of hanging identification badge, so they were easy to find. I had walked to the back of the church by then, and so I headed back to the front where they were talking. There were some large red curtains covering three openings at the back of the altar, and apparently, there were some paintings being restored behind the curtains that would be unveiled next Sunday. Her English was not that good, so Stephanie used the translate app to get the information, mainly to see if it was OK to take photos inside the church. We had seen some “no photos” signs in the back of the church, but the lady told us that was for during Mass.
After taking photos inside, we headed outside and walked around the grounds. Stephanie headed into the gift store and made a small purchase while I waited outside in the beautiful weather. It had been cooler this morning about 58 degrees, so it was very pleasant outside in the sunshine.
We headed back to the corner of the property where the first ride had dropped us off. We were going to call another rideshare, but a taxi appeared on the corner and we hailed it. We got inside and gave him the address, and he said 100 yuan, we used the translate app to say to “run the meter”, but he refused, and he stopped and we got out at the next corner. We walked back to the corner by the church and used the Didi app to call a car. We just selected the least expensive ride, it was not far to the hotel. A couple of minutes later, the car arrived. It was small but clean, and was only 13.50 yuan, a far cry from the ripoff fare of 100.00 yuan the taxi driver had wanted.
We arrived back at the hotel and went up to the room to take off our church clothes and get dressed into our touring clothes and complete our plan for the day. We did some research online about the Temple of Heaven Park. It is in a large park and there were four entrances to choose from, with the East Entrance being the most popular because it is the nearest to a Metro Station. We were also planning to go to the Pearl Market, which was close by to the Temple Park, just a few blocks away from the northeast corner of the park. The Info we were reading online said the South Entrance was the one that would have been used by the Emperor, so we selected that one thinking there would be more to see at that entrance. We did not want to go to the most popular entrance, we needed to purchase entry tickets and wanted to avoid any long lines.
We were not sure what the entrance fee covered. From the map we saw online, we could see that there are several buildings and structures in the the park to visit, as well as the grounds of the park itself. We called our own Didi car this time, and the taxi option was the best price in Didi. Just like Uber the pricing is dynamic, so sometimes cars are more than a taxi, and sometimes they are less than a taxi.
We went outside and the taxi arrived a few minutes later. Nothing is close in Beijing, it is a large city, and you can’t get anywhere without getting into traffic. It was a longer ride than we expected, and we went on some major roads to get to the Temple Entrance, The ride was about 20 minutes long and was only 31.00 yuan. Sometimes the ride is prepaid, and other times it is not. However, all rides are estimated and if there is a discrepancy, the pricing is adjusted, we know for sure in the upward direction, but we also think for the downward direction if the actual fare is less cost.
We got out of the taxi when we arrived and there were a lot of people around, as well as several tour buses and other taxis. We headed to the South entrance and off to the side was the ticket counter. We had tried to purchase tickets online before we left, but the website would not load, and we gave up. Luckily, there was no line at the ticket office, and we walked right up. The lady asked for our passports, which we take with us everywhere here, they are used a lot for identification at any major tourist site. We found out that I was considered a “senior”, and there was no charge for my entry. Stephanie purchased her ticket which included entry to the main building area in the park, and the cost was 34.00 yuan.
We headed to the first entrance turnstile, and I had to show my passport again to get in and Stephanie used her receipt code for entrance. We thought the receipt code would be for both of us, but I had to use my passport at each entry point that required showing a ticket.
The Temple of Heaven Park was not at all like we thought, everything here required some form of ticket to visit. One ticket was just for the large 650-acre park itself, but the other more expensive ticket allowed us entry to visit all of the buildings, which is what Stephanie had purchased, and I got for free.
It was not crowded at first, but we were in a large open area. As soon as we arrived at the first site, it got a lot more crowded. It was an interesting visit. There are three main structures in the Temple of Heaven Park, The Circular Mound Altar, The Imperial Vault of Heaven, and The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. These are all in a line in the order given as you proceed through the park from the south to north.
All of these structures were extremely crowded with people, everyone was getting condensed into a smaller areas around the buildings themselves. All of the structures had open doors to look inside of but there were barriers to keep everyone out, you were only allowed to look inside from afar, and the crowds at the barriers we needed to get to to see inside the buildings were a little overwhelming.
Here is an excerpt from a Beiging Website about the Temple of Heaven.
Located on the east side outside the Zhengyang Gate, the Temple of Heaven was used as a site by emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties to offer sacrifice to heaven and pray for bumper harvests. The northern part of the Temple of Heaven is semicircular while the southern part is square, a pattern representing the ancient belief that “Heaven is round and Earth square”. Surrounded by a double wall, and covering an area of 273 hectares, it is divided into the Inner Temple and the Outer Temple by the double wall. Main buildings are concentrated in the Inner Temple. As a masterpiece of building techniques of Ming and Qing dynasties, the Temple of Heaven is a precious ancient architecture and the world’s largest building complex for offering sacrifice to heaven.
At one point, we headed out into the park, but realized there might be more to see, so instead of heading to the park’s east entrance, we continued onward, and sure enough, there was another building to see, which was more like the pictures I had seen for this site, it was taller than the other structures, and this was The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. We did not have a map, to show us what was here, but the directions signage was good, and in both English and Chinese. All of the things we saw here also had descriptive signs in both languages. It was an information overload, and we will try to add more specifics on the things we saw later on, we will have to look them up online.
Here is a link to a great Self Guided Video Tour with information about all of the buildings at The Temple of Heaven.
We eventually got to the East Entrance, and as described, it was more popular, and that meant it was really crowded. There was tour group after tour group walking down the long covered corridor. We were like fish swimming upstream. We finally got to the exit at the east entrance and went outside the gated area. We looked on the Map.me app to see how far the pearl market was from our current location.
it was not far and when we got to the street crossing, we could see the large sign on the outside of the building. We had to cross at a very large intersection, it was about six lanes across, counting the car lanes and the bus lanes, which are separate. We followed a tour group out partway across the first set of bus lanes. The group’s leader seemed to know what to do and we just followed her group. Finally, the light changed on the pedestrian crossing to green, and we headed the rest of the way across the wide street.
The pearl market was about three blocks to the left, and when we arrived, we went through the side door. Inside, there were a lot of small booths set up with people selling about everything you could think of, souvenirs, electronics, special phone stores, etc. However, we saw no pearls anywhere, none at all. We headed through to the other end of the building, constantly being asked to look at each area of goods by each vendor. Some were nice, some seemed a little persistent. On the other end was an escalator going down, so we went down only to find it was just a food court area and some bathrooms. We each used the bathroom, one at a time, and Stephanie got her first experience using a squat toilet in the Women’s restroom.
The men’s room had stalls with doors, but also had urinals, which was all I needed. After using the restrooms, we headed back upstairs. While I was in the restroom, Stephanie looked up information on the Pearl Market and found that there are several floors in the building and the pearl shops are located on the upper floors. We headed up the escalator. On the next floor up, there were some nicer stores and well as a few souvenir stores. One of the stores in the back corner had glass Christmas ornaments and other glassware. A lady came out who could speak English, and she and Stephanie started looking at some of the very pretty glass. All of it was hand-painted from the inside with really small brushes. It was not terribly priced, and we knew we could negotiate. We spent some time there but did not buy anything, we wanted to look at the other stores on the other floors.
We once again took the escalator up, and when we got to the third floor, it was full of pearl vendors. It was nice to walk around here, no one bothered you as you were looking at their items. There were quite a few people buying things, but we were just not sure we needed anything, especially pearls, and were not sure how to pick out good quality pearls from all of the choices. It was still interesting, there were probably 40 or more separate spaces selling pearls on this floor.
We headed up the escalator once again to another floor, and this one had a lot of exclusive-looking shops, not nearly as many as the floor below, these were larger individual store spaces. In the information Stephanie had read, it said the higher the floor, the more exclusive the merchandise. There was an open door at one corner and there was a rooftop bar and some tables outside. We headed out to the roof area, but it did not look like the bar there was open, so we did not stay long.
We headed back downstairs to look at the glass again, we had discussed a couple of things, we might be interested in purchasing, one being a Christmas ornament, and we decided on the one we saw that depicted the Great Wall.
Stephanie looked at a lot of other items with the lady, and I stood off to the side. A man was sitting at a table with various tea-making items and some chairs. He said for me to have a seat, so I took a chair and rotated it away from the table. I did not know that he had invited me to sit and have some tea with him, so he asked me if I wanted to try some different teas, so turned the chair back toward the table. He made two different teas, one at a time. The first one was a green tea and the other was a flower tea. Each was made in a small pot, he poured boiling water from an electric kettle through a small porcelain device, which I guessed held the tea, into a small glazed clay pot. It only made enough to pour into two really small cups.
The green tea was good, but the flower tea was better, and was also his favorite. I found out that he was the artist who did most of the work painting the glass here in the store, and the lady with Stephanie was his wife, and she also painted the glassware. He had been to the USA before to sell some of his items and was going back in a couple of months. He was also an art teacher and held classes in this same area, we could see tables set up for that purpose.
Stephanie brought over three things, two were the same item, just with different paintings on them, and one was the ornament. We needed to pick out one of the small painted glass teapots to go with the ornament. The nan made Stephanie some tea while we were trying to make our decision, and we had a good chat with him and his wife while we were deciding. Stephanie asked if they had anything with cats painted on them, and she showed them some pictures of our cat Sophie. They brought over two small flat-sided glass bottles with cats painted inside them, which were more expensive than we wanted to purchase. He said each bottle took about 10 days to paint, and that was why they were a little pricy.
Stephanie made one offer to them on their handheld calculator for our two items and it was a little low, they actually chuckled. They were going to make an offer back, but Stephanie put in another price and that was acceptable. This was all done on the calculator to make it easier to enter and show numbers. We paid them with Alipay and the lady boxed up our purchases. The teapot had been on a small wooden stand, and Stephanie asked about that, we had to use the translate app for her to understand what we wanted, and they were confused about what she was asking for at first. Once they understood, the lady went and got the small stand and put it in the box with the teapot.
We thanked them for the tea and headed out. We were getting tired of walking, so we decided to head back to the hotel There was a taxi stand outside the Pearl Market and we went there to get a taxi, or so we thought. We handed the man who greeted us the card from the hotel with the address on it in Chinese, and he said 100.00 yuan, I guess that is the standard price for all taxi rides on the street. We said no and asked for a metered ride, and he refused. Then he wanted me to put a price on his calculator of what we wanted to pay for the ride, and I said no, use the meter, and he refused so we walked away. Another man came up to offer us a ride, but we could not get him to say if he would use the meter either, so again we walked away. The first man was trying to get us to come back or get our attention, but we just kept walking, and he was not happy. This was the second time today that we had issues with taxis and the meter, so we decided we needed to ask about it at the hotel and how we were supposed to hail a metered taxi on the street.
We ended up calling a taxi with the Didi App, at least we would know the price ahead of time. The taxi arrived a few minutes later and we headed to the hotel. It was about 20 minutes back with the traffic. Once we arrived at the hotel, our plan was to stay outside and use the Map.me App to find a grocery store nearby. It showed one that was not too far away, just about three blocks, so we headed there using the map directions as we went.
When we arrived at the location it was a bank Building, and we thought maybe the store was inside and on a floor underneath the bank. We walked all around and finally found an entrance to the bank building on the side. A guard asked us where we were going, of course in Chinese, and we tried to ask him about the grocery store through our translate app. Another man was walking by and the guard asked him to help, apparently, he spoke some English. We did find out that there was no grocery here, but the man directed us to another building down the road on the right, so we headed that way.
We had already walked in this area earlier when we were walking in the wrong direction to the Metro station yesterday. There was some construction going on and there were two pedestrian tunnels set up to go through the construction area, which we had walked through before, and had not seen a grocery. I was too tired to go hunting for the grocery store, so I sat on a small wall and let Stephanie go exploring while I waited there.
A short time later, I received a text from her that she had found the grocery store and it was quite large. I asked where she was and she gave me directions there. I decided to go and help now that she had found it, and I walked through the tunnel and to the right to some steps going down to an entrance below street level. It was an entrance to a large mall and the grocery was inside the mall on the lower level. It took me a bit to find Stephanie inside the grocery store, but she was near the cold beer section, which was one of our objectives. The beers we had last night in the bar were about $10.00 each for a bottle of beer, way more than we wanted to pay on a regular basis.
We found some cold beers, but most were from Germany and a few were from Japan, like Ichiban Kirin. We got six of those and then went to look at the warm beer selections, which were different for some reason. We were really surprised that they did not have any Chna beers in the cold area, but we did find one Chinese beer selection in the aisle with warm beer, but there was only one can left. There were some 10-packs of the same beer, but they were in a special box for traveling, and the labeling was apparently for English-speaking tourists, and so was the price. The single can on the shell was 6.25 yuan, but the beers in the special tourist box were almost 11.00 yuan apiece. Stephanie went to ask the same store lady she had spoken to earlier about where the beer was in the store before I arrived, and she asked her about the box price being higher per beer. She did not know why it was more other than it was packaged in the special box. They did not have any more loose cans, and it was surprising that they only had enough shelf space for about 6 cans of that beer when it was in stock.
We did find the Korean beer we had on the flight from Seoul to Beijing, so we got four cans of that. We also picked out some bagels and cream cheese for a lighter and quicker breakfast. The buffet was nice, but it was too expensive to eat everyday, it was just not worth $40.00 per person.
We took the groceries back to the room and sat and enjoyed a couple of cold beers and relaxed. We soaked in our large tub in the bathroom with a view of the city trying to relieve some of our aches and pains from all of the walking. We just planned to go to the buffet for dinner, we did not know where else to go, and we had not seen any eating places around the hotel, and we were tired.
After relaxing and then showering, we headed downstairs to the buffet, only to find it was closed on Sundays, who knew. Now we had to find something else. We knew there were a couple of restaurants in the mall, so we headed there. On the way, we stopped at the Sushi restaurant that we were not sure was part of the hotel, it is across the middle entrance outside the drop-off area from the hotel entrance. We looked at the menu and saw It was extremely expensive, so it was off to the mall to find dinner.
We found a restaurant guide inside the mall entrance, it just showed a single picture of food and the name of the restaurants, and they were displayed by floors, or levels. That was not much help, how could we determine what was available from just a single picture? We did see that most of the restaurants were on the first level, which was the same level as the grocery store, so we headed down the escalator, There were several restaurants to choose from, but some were just about empty and some were pretty full. We found one that was very full of people eating so we looked at the menu. There were a lot of selections so we knew we could find something and the prices were reasonable. ‘
We were seated at a table/booth by a wall, and we chose to both sit on the booth-type seat side of the table looking out into the restaurant, who wants to look at a wall. Our server came over with menus and we looked through it. I found a beef with potatoes and carrots that was served in a large bowl, and Stephanie found a spicy chicken dish. We ordered those along with a bowl of white rice each, and two beers, the only ones they had on the menu. Our server used his translator app to tell us the beer was room temperature and asked if we wanted ice, we said no.
He brought the beers and two glasses. The beers were somewhat cold, so we were perplexed at the question he had asked. The glasses were room temperature, maybe he meant those were not cold. Anyway, the beer was good. It did not take long for the food to arrive. Mine came out first and looked like a small pressure cooker pot when they brought it to the table, the lid was still on, and after taking off the lid, they lit a burner underneath.
Stephanie’s food came out a couple of minutes later and her bowl was huge, more like a serving bowl than an eating bowl. We both had plates to put the food onto from the bowls. It was all really good, and very temperature hot. Stephanie’s chicken was small pieces that were chopped up from the larger normal-sized chicken pieces and still had the bones in them. They apparently came from some pretty small chickens, there was not much meat on them, but it tasted good.
We ate most of both dishes and had another beer each. It was all really good, and different. We were glad we had chosen this spot to eat at, and it was much less than the price we would have paid to eat at the hotel buffet had it been open, and this was much better food.
We headed back to the hotel, and on the way there, we found we could go to the hotel directly from the mall without going outside, and it was much shorter. We made one error and walked entirely around one store before we found the hallway to the hotel entrance at the end of the mall. We had exited the escalator, and we had not looked behind us thinking it was the end of the building, but it was not.
We did not stay up much longer, we had a full day and we still have not completely adjusted to the 12-hour time difference.
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