Last day in Beijing

For our last day in Beijing, we decided to visit a park near our hotel: Beihai Park. It's a pretty old park and features a beautiful lake and a small hill where a white dagoba rests.
This tree is really old and has a famous history of having provided shade to an emperor. Mildly cool.
This temple contains a -no photographs allowed- jade buddha of 1.5m that was a gift to the emperor. Apparently the buddha has no flaws whatsoever.
Beautiful scenery all around
This cool turtle lion is guarding the templeThe way to the dagoba has all kinds of interesting caves
And they all seemed to contain a different sculpture. I liked this one
The view from the top was interesting
Even if it doesn't look like you can get inside the dagoba.
The way down features some nice rock formations that are really interesting to walk through
And the lake side is a beautiful walk on its own
For dinner, we found a Thai/Indonesia place where we had a really delicious mixed grill. Look at this platter. Delicious.
And after dinner, we caught an acrobatics show. No cameras allowed, sorry. Here's a picture of the pamphlet to wet your appetite.
These gymnasts/dancers were really talented. One of the stand out performance involved about a dozen girls riding on a single bike in an inverted pyramid. Wow! Some juggling, tap dancing, contortionists, loose rope jumping and playing with props like lights at the ends of a rope rounded the show into a really good night out.

Tomorrow is travelling back to Canada. While I will miss China, I am ready to go back. I may do a few more pieces of debriefing / thoughts after the trip but it most likely won't be until at least Saturday.

Towers of Xi'an

Xi'an has towers that provide landmarks in the middle of its walls. You've seen the Bell Tower before from my first entry about Xi'an
And there's also its sister tower, the Drum Tower.
Today we decided to visit both towers.

The Drum Tower is full of drums! For a small donation you can even bang the giant drum.
The roof features a bunch of cool details
And the top balcony offers great views of the city below
Inside the tower is an exhibit on, what else, drums!
I really wanted to bang on that one
The next stop was the Bell tower which has, you guessed it, a big bell!
You could bang the bell for a small donation, we didn't. Inside the tower was an exhibit on pottery and one on furniture (no pictures allowed for the furniture!)
Apparently, the Chinese invented the chairs. There were early model chairs on display. Mildly interesting would be an overstatement.

The views and architecture of the building itself were the real attraction...
The next stop on our daily visit to the city core's sights was the small goose pagoda where we climbed 14 (or was it 15?) of these narrowing and uneven staircases
to make it to the broken top floor
where we got some pretty amazing views

We wandered the rest of the grounds
Where I was able to bang this drum for a donation half of what was required at the bell tower, what a deal!
The bell is rumored to resound for 5km!

Admission to the grounds also includes the Xi'an museum
We visited a few exhibits about pottery
Buddhas
Calligraphy
and Chinese paintings
The highlight of the museum is surely the grounds where beautiful picture opportunities abound
Next, we made our way to Tang Dynasty Xi'an which is a fancy restaurant that offers a show after dinner (we didn't go to the show!) The restaurant looks really good and lots of attention on the details from the table centerpriece
to the fake gold walls
and matching plates and bowls
I'm not sure what parts of the chicken was floating in my chicken coconut soup but it tasted all right
The tofu and seafood in a soupy sauce were really really delicious
So was this bbq pork in honey
These noodles with beef were also pretty good
And this chicken drumstick stuffed with shrimps were awesome!
And lots of fruits for dessert, yummy!
After dinner, we made our way to the big goose pagoda
Where we watched was is reputedly the largest musical fountain in Asia (how many are there?)
The show was pretty cool but a bit underwhelming. It sounds cooler on paper I guess. We wandered around and found some pretty creepy sculptures depicting scenes of the every day life of regular Chinese
The whole area felt pretty festive with carnival like games for the foolish (or confident)
It's a beautiful area to spend a lazy evening
Tomorrow is a travel day to Beijing. I can't wait to see the capital!!!