Last Day in Beijing

We discovered a few weeks before leaving home that we had inadvertently ended up with an unguided 'free day' as our last day in Beijing. We decided to embrace it and go it alone. This turned out to be fortuitous, since Ben developed a fever on Sunday night and it gave us a chance to let him sleep all day Monday.

We left Ben in Grant's watchful care while Monica, Heidi, and I rode the subway to The Temple of Heaven. This is an expansive wooded park with three large temples situated along its north-south access. The place was built in the 1400s, and was the location of rituals and sacrifices performed by emperors and other government officials in order to ensure good crops in the coming year. The temples are characteristically grand and beautiful, the perfect backdrop for our extended photo shoot with a nice Chinese family.

We rode the subway back to our corner of Beijing and stopped into a convenience store for water, sprite, crackers, cookies and some instant ramen noodles. One more stop at a street cart for bananas and we were sufficiently provisioned for a relaxing afternoon and evening in our rooms, resting up for our early morning flight to Tokyo.