A lot of walking today – we started with the Temple of Heaven. Amazingly, it is even bigger than the Forbidden City but fortunately, we went in the south side and out the Eastern gate, so we didn’t have to walk the whole thing (we’d still be there!). The Temple of Heaven is a favourite gathering place for Beijing’s gentry, where they enjoy dancing (tai chi and line dancing) and games, both active and passive (like

hacky sack and mah-jong). Our students couldn’t help themselves and joined in wherever they could. It certainly helped ward off the cold and they had a lot of fun.

We all got photos on the Emperor’s kneeling stone at the Hall of Good Harvest (fortunately, we were the only ones there so it made it easy) and marveled at the architecture from 600 years ago.

Another bonus for today was a visit to the Temple of Heaven Tea house, where we all learned the correct way to sample 6 different teas. Matt thought each one was even better than the previous – we think this was the highlight of his whole trip.

Lunch was followed by our final historic site of Beijing – the Summer Palace. It loses something in winter, with the frozen lake and mist everywhere, but it is still spectacular. The summer home of the emperor and his court for many hundreds of years, you can easily see why they enjoyed staying there.

We returned to the hotel and most students decided to hit the Silk Street markets again, and many more bargains were found. The evening was spent trying to decide how best to fit all of the purchases into our suitcases.

Tomorrow is a travel day – the fast train to Shanghai.