Temple of Heaven and Shopping street.

We slept in nice and late today, enjoying the rest minus the loud people who were waking us up early. Our hotel’s walls are paper thin or something, because we heard them plain as day and it was pretty aggravating, although when the heater was on it helped drown them out a bit. We left and got out near Tiananmen station although on an alternate line. Our first stop was a shopping street that starts by heading straight south of Tiananmen. The street was pretty recently renovated, and had two trolleys moving at a snails pace back and forth. We walked along it for a bit, then cut down the shopping street, snagging some meat on a stick for lunch (three sticks for 10 yuan, aka 1.50$, not a bad deal huh? :P) We walked along this for a while, looking into several little shops, but not finding anything particularly interesting. We looked through several tea shop’s selection of tea sets, but they were pretty far overpriced for the quality. We did end up settling on getting a Chinese style lantern that wasn’t particularly exceptional but was pretty cheap, so that was fine for us. We also got some neat cut-out paper art as well. These were really quite neat, despite the person selling it to us trying to say they were the four seasons, even though the characters were quite obviously not for the seasons. But we still liked them very much and ended up getting them. That rounded out our time on the shopping street, and we snagged some candied apples and strawberries on our way out as we looked for our next stop; the underground city. The city was ordered to be built by Mao during the Sino-Soviet rift during the 60’s. While there are several entrences, we were trying to find the most visible, unfortunately, it was well hidden, the streets weren’t marked well either, and it looked like we had to make our way through some rather rougher areas of town to get to it.
We decided that we weren’t particularly in the mood for dealing with that, so we just kept going down the street we were on and then doubled back to get to the main street that we follow south to get to the Tian Tan (aka Temple of Heaven, a bit of a misnomer). The walk there was fairly long, as the street directly south had actually been at an angle so we ended up having to go back east to get to the north gate. That added quite a bit of time to the walk, but we were pretty happy by the time we got there. We entered at the North end, with the complex being situated along a North-South axis as its major theme. So we actually ended up starting at the place that the Emperor ended his trip, but that was fine. The north end had the hall of heavenly prayers for good harvests, the building most commonly associated as the ‘Temple of Heaven’. This main building is 125 ft tall, toped with a golden finial, and was built without using a single nail. Pretty darn impressive. We then moved south along the Red Step Bridge, a bridge that sits about 10 feet above the ground and is the central walkway along the entire complex. In the very center of this brick road is a smooth marble path that the Emperor used; a direct line from Qinian Dian at the northern end and the Marble Platform at the southern end. After we reached the southern end’s marble platform, we began to walk around the outer areas of the complex, which had long walkways and many cypress trees, some over 400 years old. While walking along the outer section, we noticed that some people up ahead were stopped and looking back into the woods. Once we got up there, we saw why, there was a white cat nestled down in the long grass stalking some birds. Just after we got there it made it’s move, sprinting for them and jumping up, flaying it’s legs as it attempted to snag all four birds instead of one; ending up with none. It was pretty awesome, particularly as it looked around after it’s attempt and noticed that there were a dozen people looking at it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cat blush before, but that’s about the closest I’ll ever see. We finished up and made our way out of the complex and back towards home, stopping at the restaurant near our station with the really delicious sweet and sour pork (and the dumplings we had were also really good.)