↑ Today I went to both the temple of heaven park and the natural history museum. The temple of The Temple of Heaven, literally the Altar of Heaven is a complex of Taoist buildings situated in the southeastern part of central Beijing. The complex was visited by the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties for annual ceremonies of prayer to Heaven for good harvest. It is regarded as a Taoist temple, although Chinese Heaven worship, especially by the reigning monarch of the day, pre-dates Taoism.
← The two most interesting parts of the temple of heaven are “the emperor’s stone” which is where the emperor actually stood to do his prayers to heaven and also the clapping wall. Basically if you stand in a specific spot then you can clap, or make some kind of sound, and the sound is reflected back. This meant that when the emperor did this, to the people outside it sounded as if the gods were giving him either a round of applause or that they were giving him some kind of praise. Of course I tried both of these things out, however, nobody was impressed and sadly my wishes for the temperature to remain above zero were ignored. Well, a girl has to try.
↑ The bins were also quite interesting and i feel were TTOTALLY authentic…
↑ Then I headed to the Beijing Natural history museum where I got to go to Jurrasic park and see dinosaurs eating other dinosaurs and ostriches who apparently live in the same habitat as baboons. I am not really convinced of this fact but if anyone else has some kind of better idea please do tell me.
← I was originally drawn to the museum because apparently there was an exhibition of humans much like the one of Dr. Gunther von Hagens was on show. I was excited-maybe dead people would be very interesting. However, I was much disappointed to discover that only a few random bit of genitalia were on display and willies are ugly enough anyway without being shriveled up. So, sadly, the most exciting thing about the Beijing natural history museum was the collection of Geese I found wandering about outside in the street for no apparent reason.
(Blog posted by the Scottish Nomad on April 5, 2012. You can see the original article by following this link to The Scottish Nomad)
