Beijing 2017, part 5: Exciting Logistics and The Temple Of Heaven

After we left Jingshan Park we were again in need of transportation for dinner, and again were flagged down by an ambitious tuktuk driver.  This time it was an open-air contraption that looked like it was mostly built from Ikea scrap, and I had the presence of mind to get most of it on video.  First we got stuck in this traffic jam in a hutong side-street:

And here's the rest of the ride once we got out onto the main road.  Apologies for the sound quality, the on-board microphone on my Canon DSLR was not designed for quite that much wind!

The next day was our last in Beijing, but we had time in the morning to visit one last site, the Temple of Heaven.  This temple complex is of roughly the same vintage as the rest of the palaces and temples in Beijing, and was the site where emperors performed highly complex harvest rituals.  Now it is a park where the locals do tai chi in the morning and practice with spinning tops.  Here's an uncle teaching Maxwell the basic idea.

From the park you go through a series of gates and temples to progress as the emperor would have throughout the temple complex.  All of the important buildings and structures are round (because heaven is round).  We did not make it to the Temple of Earth on this trip, where everything is square.  We let the kids take turns with various cameras, here's a curated selection of what they felt was important:

Here's a few more from Michael, including the 500-year-old "Nine Dragon" Juniper tree, and the long covered walkway for the emperor that leads to the east gate, now filled with gambling locals.

While at the Temple of Heaven park, Michael started getting cryptic yet urgent messages from work. We dashed back to the hotel to retrieve our bags and let him log in to find out that he's headed to Las Vegas in November!

After a quick lunch, we caught a taxi and pointed to our itinerary to give him directions to the airport...only to find out once we arrived that we were at the wrong terminal! Yikes!

Thus ensued 2.5 panicked hours of
running to catch the only shuttle that could take us to the correct terminal,
running from one check-in gate to the next until we found the right one,
followed by exit customs with incredibly stern officers (what do you mean we don't have the right form? Quick, fill out forms for five people with only one working pen!),
the hurry-up-and-wait of security screening, and finally
the mad dash to the far end of the gate.

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..and we arrived with 5 minutes to spare before boarding. That was close!

Go Team Singaborchert! Though kid complaints were plentiful in the morning, once they understood the situation was serious, the kids really pulled it together and were fantastic travelers.

Overall I think we had a great introduction to traveling in China, and all came away with a much better understanding of Chinese history and culture.  So much of what we know about this part of the world comes to us filtered through Hollywood and the western-centric historical narrative, it was a great experience to be able to follow the threads without that baggage* and see the way modern China puts their own long and varied history into context, and to see how these historical places are still living and breathing elements in the modern culture as well. 

We also managed to get ourselves into plenty of situations outside our comfort zone, and I think all of us pushed our boundaries.  This was definitely good practice for our next family trip: two weeks in Thailand over Christmas!

* fully aware that there is just a different set of cultural baggage related to the civil war and communist revolution...