Beijing: Day 4

My god... It was a mistake to write about the trip day by day... Takes damn a long time to load every single photo.... Anyway, here's a continuation of the trip:

We were taken to this place called "Hu Tong" that morning. Except for the trishaw ride... I wasn't exactly sure what I was supposed to be looking at... At one side... there were some really ulu houses with narrow back lanes... and on the right... a nice lake... Check out the trishaws... and one of the youngest tour members - SuAnne.

After that, we were taken to this Panda Garden. Believe it or not, the entire China only has 3 panda bears left. And ahem... they're really not that cute... in fact I thought they looked kinda dirty and lazy...


But apart from pandas, they've got this beautiful landscaped garden. My parents and I took the most number of photos here... cos they've got nice trees... :)


After that, we went for lunch... and visited a pearl factory. Then we stopped at Summer Palace. This is the place where old folks would gather to sing songs... play a game of chess... do taichi... write using gigantic brushes on the floor (to practice internal chi) and to generally "lepak"...

Next was the Underground City. Now this was truly an eye opener to the great military defense that China has. Underground City was also called the Underground Great Wall since they had the same military defense purpose. Why military defense? Becos' it was apparently built to house 40% of the capital's population on ground in the event of an attack. Here, there were facilities such as stores, restaurants, clinics, schools, theaters, reading rooms, factories etc etc...

Although the underground city was thankfully never needed for its intended purpose, it has been nicely maintained by officials and if you don't know it's existence, likely you won't guess it by the look of it's entrance:

We ended the day by attending a Chinese musical called: Chun Yi, The Legend of Kung Fu. Having seen several musicals like FAME, CATS, The Sound of Music etc, I must say that this musical was GREAT!!! It was very entertaining as it was interspersed with lots of Shaolin acts in between plus the sound effects, backdrops, costumes, props and everything else were great and definitely on par (if not better) that some of the musicals out there.


The story revolves around a little boy at an ancient temple. He was initiated into the monastery and was given the name Chun Yi (the pure one). The little monk studied Zen and Kung Fu very hard. Years went by and the boy became a man. After many years of hard training, his body was as solid as iron. Eventually, he fell into the trap of temptation where he chased after the beautiful fairy he created in his mind (in other words, trained too much, went cuckoo lor) and hence stopped his Buddhist practices. Eventually he suffered great remorse and went back to the temple. He passed a glorious ritual of passing through the temple gate and accomplished his final task to be a warrior monk. When his master passed away, Chun Yi became the abbot and in the end reached the ultimate goal of enlightenment. The end.

0 comments:

Post a Comment