Beijing, the old version

Last week we went to Beijing, the capital of China, the Heart of the Dragon. Beijing is a very diverse city. On one hand you have horse drawn carts:

  

and on the other hand you have Nike:

This week I will just write about the old Beijing. There are many amazing old things in Beijing, such as the Great Wall or the Forbidden City, and we went to all of them! The first amazing thing we went to was the Lamma Temple. It is a very old temple. Most of the temples in Beijing were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, but this one was one of the few that survived the Revolution. Two Emperors were born there. It was one of the major temples in Beijing. 

Here is a picture of the front gate:

 

This is a picture of a Prayer Wheel: people spin the wheel then pray while it is spinning.

The next big place that we went to was the Forbidden City. It was built six-hundred years ago and has 980 buildings with 1,707 rooms over 720,000 square meters of land! It was Incredible! 

It was so big! Here are some pictures from it:

Just outside the Forbidden City is Tiananmen Square. It is very famous for its central location and all the protests and demonstrations held there. 

A couple days later we went to the Great Wall. We got there by  train. It was a very nice trip and I got some good pictures of the Great Wall from the train:

The Great Wall was also amazing! Guess how long it is. Nobody really knows, but is estimated to be 10,000 to 20,000 km long. We only got to walk a little way though. Here is a picture:

Later that week we went to the Temple of Heaven. It was beautifully built with its design of rings. It was built to connect man to heaven. 

 

The last "old" thing that we went to in Beijing was a show about Kung Fu. The monks who did it were incredible! Here is a young monk (the one without hair!):

Next week I will do a post on the new Beijing, so bye for now

Jonathan

=P