Mar 05 The Temple of Heaven

The Temple of Heaven

Hi Yanko

How was your day? Did you have a good day at work? Thanks for posting those great photos, they were beautiful. The colours and places shown in them looked so vibrant and enticing. Your blog was like a huge advert for tourism for your city and really made me wish that I could visit all the landmarks and sight seeing places you mentioned. After looking at the beach picture, I realised that I am yearning for the sea, sand and sunbathing. It’s been a long time since I had a ‘beach’ holiday; in fact the last time was January 2006 when I went to Kohl Lanta in Thailand. Teah (my one and a half year old daughter) has never see the sea or played on the beach and I’m sure she would love it (even though she’d probably eat the sand and try to swallow sea water!!) It’s a situation I’m hoping to rectify this summer.


I thought I would introduce you somewhere famous in Beijing but not the obvious places like the Great Wall and Tian An Men Square because I’m sure you know all about those two and have seen many pictures of them. One of my favourite places in Beijing is called the Temple of Heaven and I have posted a photo of one part of it below. There are so many temples all over China that some people say ‘if you have seen one, you have seen them all’ because they can appear to be very similar. The Temple of Heaven is architecturally quite distinctive, in my opinion, and the Ming and Qing dynasty emperors performed rites for the entire nation in this temple. Very precise attention was paid to all aspects of its design including colours and numbers (everything is in multiples of three).
This picture shows the Hall of Good Harvests and I find it amazing as it was built without a single nail.

These days the temple is an all year round tourist attraction and the surrounding park comes alive around 6am with local residents(mainly senior citizens) who are doing their daily exercises and activities, everything from kite flying to tai-chi to practicing opera singing!


The language point I want to highlight today is ‘Thanks for the warmly reception’, you should use the adjective in this sentence which is ‘warm’. Warmly is an adverb and could be used in a sentence like this ‘I was warmly welcomed by the readers’
‘I have some nice friends at this cities’ contains two mistakes. First the wrong preposition, change 'at' to ‘in’ and because you have used the plural word ‘cities’ , in order to make it agree, you must say ‘these’


I’m not feeling too good today as I got a bout of food-poisoning on Sunday night and haven’t fully recovered from it. So I’ll go now and curl up in bed with a hot-water bottle and try to sleep it off!

Best wishes

Trudi

Vocabulary

vibrant (adj) lively and full of energy

enticing (adj) to attract because of hope or desire

yearn for a strong desire or wish

rectify(v) to correct a situation

distinctive (adj) very different and distinguishing

dynasty (n) period of time in Chinese history

rites (n) religious or solemn ceremony

multiples of three (n) groups of three or numbers that cab be divided by three

senior citizens elderly people

bout (n) sudden attack of an illness