So, the park is quite cheap to get into during the winter, and also nearly deserted.
Half of it is closed until the summer arrives, and it's too cold for much dallying around.
We started out by visiting the imperial residences and stuff in the compound.
There are lots of gorgeous pine trees, and it's generally quiet and peaceful in this city.
I love these long walkways they have all over China. They're shockingly cool.
You could pay some lady 20 RMB to give you a tour of the park all day, but we really weren't all that interested. It was more of a "wander around and explore" kind of trip.
There were rooms with hundreds of pieces of jade, or porcelain, or other imporant thin ..... zzzzZzzzzz .....
This is like the biggest crowd we saw all day.
Winter was especially cold in China this year, so the small lakes were all still frozen over. Coool!
The ice was starting to thaw a bit, but it was still plenty safe to walk around on it in most places.
We kept seeing this rock formation in the distance, but never quite figured out what it is. Looked interesting though.
Will definitely have to come back to this place in the summer time.
Our first panoramic view of the lake. Very pretty. (Notice I came up with something more creative than "crappy panorama time"!)
If you're not sure what's going on this, this map will happily tell you your situation!
There are wild deer in this park. Apparently they're not friendly.
It really wasn't all that cold out today. Really nice for walking around.
I've found that I've very much gotten used these "China" colours. I find them soothing now as opposed to drab or washed.
Idriss and Maria
Me: Asian Pose.
Me: Serious pose.
There are ancient ruins here too.
Not sure what's so exciting about them, but ....
At first I thought these were nests. They're actually mistletoe, a parasite on trees.
There's also a totally creepy amusement park in here too. Alarmingly colourful on a day like today!!
I thought this kid was giving me the finger. I was going to swear at him.
Turns out he's not.
The ice is still pretty thick here, so we played around on it for a while.
I snuck a picture of this girl.
Once she noticed, she immediately straightened up and posed.
The park is really well laid out and fun to walk around.
We ended up accidentally stalking this girl and her boyfriend around the park.
She was really big into posing for pictures.
Dragon boat!
More covered walkways alright!
The ice is expanding and buckling already.
You could buy food and feed the fish from this bridge.
Holy carp! That's a lot of goldfish!
Deerses!
They didn't attack us, thankfully.
More mistletoe.
Waterfall!!!
Up ahead is a mountain you can climb up atop and get gorgeous views of the surrounding countryside.
Well, except that it's closed for the winter and doesn't open for four more weeks. D'oH!
So we'll go check out the tall tower in the distance.
That's a kinda chubby spirit turtle thingie.
You can walk part of the way up the tower. It's cool.
More views of that weird stone thing on the hills in the distance.
The whole park is surrounded by a wall.
It's not to keep the barbarians out, but the locals.
Next stop: One of the 8 temples.
All temple complexes here appear to have the exact same basic structure, so you just walk past the buildings one at a time.
They've all got the same giant brass drums, etc.
The same giant obese turtles.
Um ... okay.
"OW!!!! OW!!! MY FRONT LEGS!!!! OW THAT HURTS!!! CRAP!!!!"
The temples don't tend to be in the best of repair, and could definitely do with a new paint job.
But they're still cool.
This one has its own little tower out back.
That's the Putuo temple in the distance, our next stop.
I love this urn thing. It has what I can "om nom nom feet".
They're like heads that eat the legs.
Funny thing about the Putuo place. It's modelled on the Potala.
Except everything is painted on instead of actually built like the real one.
"OW OW OW OW! SOMEBODY PLEASE FIX MY FRONT LEGS!!!"
It's still impressively huge, however.
Painted on windows, yep.
But tall as hell.
Views of the countryside and the Mountain Resort to the south are nice.
The channel is turn off Dim light Please stop! Looolz.
As the sun started setting, the lighting for pictures got better and better. We were getting kinda pooped, however, having walked a solid 6+ hours by now.
We walked back downtown to the city, which took another hour, and then sat down for a great dinner.
At a fancy Chinese restaurant that was ...
Western (as in Cowboys) themed.
Strange, but weird.
But not as weird as the ad in the bathroom for booze. ("If you drink Hu Family Brand Booze, It'll be like this").