Beijing, Spring 2006

 


Here are some general pictures from around Beijing. This is a picture of Carol, my Aunt Alice and me in a pedicab in the Hutong area of Beijing.
A picture of a Hutong street from the pedicab. A pedicab is sort of like a rickshaw but with a bike attacked for the driver.
I believe that Carol told us that Hutong actually means narrow streets. These are the old traditional neighborhoods of Beijing. Many are located around the Forbidden City.
The Hutong area has many canals running through it. Here was a nice bridge.

On the sides of the wall are dragon like creatures that look like they are crawling down to get a drink.
While in the Hutong area we visited a school. The children were taking a nap when we arrived.
This is a Kindergarten classroom. In China Kindergarten is what people in the US would call "Pre-School" and Pre-School in China is the age in which US kids would be in "Kindergarten."
The Kindergarten room looked like a lot of fun with many little discovery corners.

This was their little plant corner where they could watch seeds grow. I particularly liked the corn on the cob growing right out of the cob. They put an ear of corn inside a cut soda bottle and kept it wet and let the corn grow right out of it. It was neat!
They also had a very cute bulletin boad with pictures of all the children posted on it. This school is run like a boarding school. The kids actually live here 5 days a week and their parents come and pick them up for weekends.
Outside the walls were brightly painted. They also had lots of toys and things to play with on the playground. One idea I liked were theses airplanes made out of soda bottles. They cut a hole in the bottom and then ran two pieces of rope through the top and down out the bottom. They then attached wings on it to make the plane. When you grab the ropes and then pull your arms outward it would push the plane up the rope. ^_^; Maybe I'm just easily amused by stuff.
Another picture of the canals.

We were invited to visit a traditional Chinese residence. The house was built in several sections surrounding a courtyard. Several generations of this family lived here all together in their own sections and then shared the common courtyard. This was the kitchen of our hostess.
Here we are standing in the common courtyard with our hostess.
Her husband was retired and he now devotes his time to making paper cut outs. He had many beautiful designs. I bought a small Chinese zodiac cut out from him. I really enjoyed seeing his studio.
Here my Aunt Alice and I sit on a traditional porch. Behind us is the door of this residence. We were told that in the old days you could tell how important the family was by the number of lintels in the top of the door. A house with four lintels like the one we are sitting at usually contained an important offical's family.

Here is one last picture of the Hutong canals.
One night in Beijing we were treated to a Peking duck dinner. Here was the kitchen where the young ducks were waiting to be cooked.
They cooked the ducks in this big oven over an open fire. The ducks were actually hanging inside that oven.
We also spent a little time at one of the four main Catholic Churches in Beijing. This church was called The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Aunt Alice got more pictures of it than I did because I was beginning to run out of memory space at this point in the trip.

We met a wonderful nun there named Sister Theresa. She gave us each a holy card showing a Chinese Madonna and baby Jesus. I love her gown.
We also had a chance to attend a Chinese opera.
A few years ago at this theatre, they began letting people come watch the actors put on make up before the show. It was really awesome to see that. We met a nice (and really tall!) theatre manager back there who told me and Aunt Alice what the show would be about for that evening.
The opera we saw was actually two sections of two different operas. One was a love story the other was an action sequence with a lot of acrobatics.

The love story was about a boy and a girl who lived in a village together. They were too shy to talk to one another so the boy left her his jade bracelet on her door step. He figured if she picked it up then she accpeted his proposal. She did pick it up and so he sent a matchmaker over to talk to her about the engagement.
The second story was about two snake sisters a white snake and a blue snake. The white snake fell in love with a human man and married him. Then an evil, jealous, Buddhist monk imprisioned her husband and the two snake sisters went to do battle with the monk. It was really exciting and the blue snake had a lot of awesome tricks on stage.
We also went to the Beijing zoo. The main attraction of course was the pandas.
The Beijing zoo actually had a lot of pandas. I was surprised to see so many.

Supposedly they also had red pandas, which I would have liked to have seen but none seemed to be out when we went by their habitat (red pandas are more racoon like than the giant panda, however pandas of both sizes are related to racoons).
Flammingos were also plentiful. The Beijing zoo also had a nice lake area for keeping ducks, swans and geese.
Probably the most unusual animal we saw was a hyacinth macaw! I never saw a macaw this color before!
He was a really beautiful and chatty bird.