Beijing, Part 1: Tiananmen Square, Temple of Heaven

I just got back from my amazing/hellish independent travel break to Beijing and Luoyang.  I'm going to be splitting my journaling into multiple easily-digestible (for you and me both) chunks, and will hopefully have all of them done in the next day or two. 

My program-mate Natan and I, warned of the difficulty of traveling during Golden Week in China (when roughly the population of the United States will all be using the national rail system at the same time), purchased our tickets from Nanjing to Beijing well over a week ahead of time.  As with Chinese rail you can 1) only buy tickets in person at the train station or post office and 2) can only buy tickets departing from the city in which you are buying them, we knew that this would be this would likely be the most comfortable leg of the trip during Golden Week (indeed, it was a "soft sleeper," with beds stacked 2-high to a berth) and cherished it as such.  We were very right.  But more on that later.

Upon arriving early in the morning on Saturday in Beijing, we observed the train station and its surroundings to be describable only as "epic," especially as by extraordinary happenstance, our first day ever in Beijing turned out to be one of their rare and valued "blue sky days" (thank you Olympic pollution crackdown!).  We meandered around downtown enjoying the wonderful weather before catching the subway to Tiananmen Square.  We gawked at the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, the Monument to the People's Heroes, the Great Hall of the People, and of course the largest public square in the world's namesake, the Gate of Heavenly Peace (adorned with a 20-foot-tall portrait of the Chairman himself).

After locating our hostel (dramatically closer than we thought it was--a mere 15 minute walk from Tiananmen!) and dropping off our things, we hopped on over to the Temple of Heaven.  A great old Taoist temple from the 1400's, it underwent a $6 million renovation ahead of the Olympics, and is now in gleaming, tip-top shape, having seen its original colorings ruthlessly stripped away and reproduced as accurately (and sealed as thoroughly) as possible.  The resulting feeling is a bit odd--while it is glimmering and beautiful, it looks far too new and superficial for its age and stature in history.

We then went on to sample a couple of Beijing's signature dishes--a fried leg of lamb and, of course, Peking Roast Duck.  The mistake made was doing both at the same meal, resulting in far too much food. 

In addition to the pictures below (Great Hall of the People,  lamb of leg/Peking Duck, Temple of Heaven) and a brief video of Tiananmen Square, you can view the rest of the pictures from our first day in Beijing here.