Day Twelve

I can't believe it's day twelve already! It actually seems like time is going by really slow...considering I'm going to be here for another 45 days. Either way, fast or slow, today was a landmark on my trip calendar. It was the perfect mix of work and play.

The first thing we did this morning was a visit to a retirement home about thirty minutes outside of the city called Sun City. The hope of our visit was to learn more about China's growing aging population to develop better insight for our future trip to Hainan. In Hainan we will be advising top architects on elderly issues they may want to address when developing blueprints for their expansive retirement community. Anyways, we took a tour of the retirement community grounds and then headed back to Downtown Beijing.

On the way back we drove by the 2008 Olympic Stadium, called the Bird's Nest, and a special district designed to coincide with its Asian ethnic minority constituents. When we got back to Beijing half of the group got off at the Forbidden City. The rest of us continued to the hotel to drop off equipment and change clothes. Once we re-situated my friend Jen and I hired a taxi to go to a Confucian temple I had been looking forward to visiting.

On our way out we learned that there was also a lamasery in proximity to the Confucian temple. The lamasery had nearly a hundred elaborate Buddha statues. As we walked back through the rooms of the temple the Buddhas got progressively bigger and bigger. The final Buddha was a whopping four stories tall. Unfortunately all the Buddhas were indoors and we were unable to take pictures of any of them. It was even more unfortunate that the Confucian temple was completely under construction! We took a couple of pictures in front of some Confucius statues but were unable to see about 90% of the temple...(tear).

After visiting the temples we joined the rest of our group back at the hotel. We hired another set of taxis and went to the Temple of Heaven. The buildings and surrounding park were very beautiful. Locals strolled the gardens and gathered around elderly musicians. I was lucky to have a voice recording device to record some traditional Chinese songs.

After our visit at the Temple of Heaven we went back to the Silk Market so that some of the girls could do some more shopping. We then finished the day with a Beijing Duck dinner. Like I said, a very eventful day. Evie I love you, happy graduation!