Starting the day off with DT again, we found another cafe. The cafes here are different. There's no concept of a cafe where people just come in to use the facilities. If you go into an establishment, it means you're going to buy something. So when we went in they seated us and gave us a menu....in true Chinese fashion we got the cheapest thing on the menu, plain black coffee.

Below is the Great Hall of the People, where every few years 2000+ communist leaders come together to discuss plans for future development. You can just feel the power of this place when you're in front of the building...very imposing. Actually the theme of Beijing, especially Tiananmen square was...Big and Imposing.
Below is 天坛，temple of heaven it's called. It's where the emperors went to worship the gods for good harvests since ancient days ~2500BC. Ancient cultures have a very consistent theme when it came to worship. They sacrificed animals there as well at a facility called "the animal killing facility" and were cooked at a place called "the divine kitchen," someplace I would have wanted to visit in its contemporary.
This mural was part of the exhibition at the temple of heaven. The images are of people doing grain worship. Interestingly, they had a conception of 上帝，the highest deity.
This was at the center of the temple, a really intense deity, apparently god of grain and harvest. People were still there praying to it, a bronze statue whose shiny surface was half worn and destroyed. I was reminded of John 6 and the bread of life.



In our next days we will be going to Xian!