Temple of Heaven: Aging Gracefully

An early start to do an almost full day tour with Intrepid Urban Adventures. Our tour group included us, an older well-travelled Aussie couple, and two lovely older men (one from Netherlands and the other from Quebec, Canada). First stop - Temple of Heaven park. Lots of older citizens exercising in the morning in a giant park. Tai chi, shuttlecock hackey, dance classes and random exercise gear. We had a go - quite good fun.

Basically once you hit 65 (men) or 60 (women), you come here every morning and play poker and exercise with your friends. Sounds pretty good and explains how everyone looked in shape!

Then we walked around the sights - beautiful buildings and a few interesting stories. Very old buildings, but young trees. Buildings (400 years old) are much older than NZ buildings. But trees are special if they're say 200 or 100 years old - relatively sure we have older trees in NZ right? Odd but nice to see NZ has some old stuff too. Oh and they use the number 9 lots - like the circular area which has 9 stones in a circle in the middle, then 18, then 27 and so on (up to 81).

There's also a matchmaker spot where parents go and lay out their kid's personal details to try find a match.

There was an echo wall and echo spot and other buildings. Quite nice then on to part 2 - Tiananmen Square.Read more