To China!
September 02, 2006

The flight from Daegu, South Korea to Beijing, China.

Since my computer class is over, I'm going to take the next few months to travel and relax some.  My first pit stop of traveling is Beijing, China!  I've always wanted to see The Great Wall of China and I think if I missed it before I left Korea, I'd be nuts.  So off I went!  I wanted to go with my friend Jeong Woo, but he couldn't make it, so I went with Young Won and Jin's son Eric.  We went with a Korean tour group so he was a big help translating what the tour guide was saying.

The Temple of Heaven

After we landed, we went to a place that translated into English means "Temple of Heaven."  It was this extremely large park with tons of people walking around, relaxing, playing cards, singing, and playing traditional instruments.  The buildings were quite large and seeing a very old place were sacrifices occurred long ago was very interesting.

The Temple of Heaven in the southern part of Beijing is China's largest existing complex of ancient sacrificial buildings. Occupying an area of 273 hectares, it is three times the area of the Forbidden City.  It was built in 1420 for emperors to worship Heaven.
The principle buildings include the Altar of Prayer for Good Harvests, Imperial Vault of Heaven and Circular Mound Altar.

Roast duck and downtown.

We then went to a restaurant where we enjoyed the famous Chinese roast duck.  It was very yummy as were the many side dishes we had.  There was a 65 year old gentleman with his wife on the trip who was automatically referred to as "grandfather" in Korean.  He ordered a Chinese beer and shared it with me and one other man on the trip.  I didn't want any beer, but I couldn't refuse.  It would be extremely rude to do so to an elder and especially an elder man.

After dinner we went downtown.  It was mainly a tourist trap-like place with tons of Chinese memorabilia for the tourists to purchase.  I did what any self respecting American would do when he visits China...I went to McDonalds!

Acrobatics and Chinese "bian lian" (face changing).

After visiting downtown, we went to an amazing performance of acrobatics and an ancient Chinese art known as Bian Lian (变脸-Chinese simplified) ("Face-Changing").  The pictures below aren't from the actual show because we weren't allowed to bring in cameras.  But everything in the pictures is just like what I saw as well as much more.

There were numerous feats of great acrobatic skill like a man balancing a woman on 6 chairs on his forehead and a women who balanced a very large porcelain bowl (with a grown man inside) on her feet!  There were also a bunch of Chinese girls doing a funky string dance thing like in the picture below.

What I learned today about Korea:  1)  I've witnessed an ancient Chinese art form that is over 300 years old.