Temple of Heaven

The last day in Beijing we went to the Temple of Heaven that is in a park. Just FYI: The emperors from the Forbidden City were known for going to this temple and all the roofs have blue tile to match the sky (instead of the traditional yellow tile). The square was full of senior citizens playing bad mitten, cards, dominos etc, because the senior citizens get into the temple for free—Terwilliger Plaza would have LOVED this place! It was pretty cool to see all these guys having domino competitions!  Then we went to a traditional teahouse! They showed us all these different types of traditional Chinese teas and how to smell them and taste them and how to hold your tea cup with your pointer finger and your thumb and have your middle finger on the bottom of the cup. These cups were not even cups-- it was like tea shots! They were sooooo small. I have HUGE tea MUGS at home and so I would have to have about 2 billion trillion sips of tea in order to even fill one of my mugs. But, they were fun to try and it was interesting to learn about all the different types of teas and what time of day they drink each kind and what tea to drink when you are sick or sad or whatever. It was good to have the tea ceremony at the end of the trip because if you have seen the bathrooms in China, you know to hold it. I thought I had to pee at the Great Wall and when I walked into the bathroom I decided to just wait until we got back to the ship… I have been to Ghana and India so that is saying a lot. Actually, now that I mention it, there are a lot of places in the world that you should probably just hold it and wait. Luckily, today, in Shanghai when we were looking for a bathroom they didn’t even have any—ANYWHERE--and had no idea what we were talking about. That takes care of that.