Fragrant Hills and Azure Clouds

Sports in Beijing - Hot Yoga and climbing up the Fragrant Hill Peak

I still do hot yoga quite often because I like it. This Friday afternoon I once again went with my Chinese boss and a nice Chinese colleague.

But it's also nice just to walk around outside in the mountains or parks and climb hills combined with some sightseeing. As the whole week was quite sunny and warm we had scheduled a trip to the Fragrant Hills for today.

Today when we woke up the sun was there - but hidden behind some clouds (positive interpretation) or behind the smog (realistic interpretation). Nevertheless the bus to the Xiangshan - Fragrant Mountains - was alreay crowded like hell and on the standard hike up the hill there were "people jams". Some seemed to belong to a school and some to a company trip as they all wore the same T-shirt and had big flags with them.

On the way down we chose a quieter path - at some spot there was a small Chinese choir practicing - we just sat down for a while, listened, relaxed, enjoyed the relatively fresh air of the mountains and watched the squirrels (German: Eichhoernchen) jump around in the trees.

In the park downstairs we visited another temple - the Temple of Azure Clouds (Bi yun si). Specialties there were:

1. the hall of over 500 wooden carved old "arhat" sculptures (arhats = pupils of buddhas) covered with gold. Every arhat was different in gesture, facial expression etc. Wow!

2. a pound full of goldfishes. If you paid 80 Kuai (8 EUR) you could release a goldfish from the small aquarium at the shop next door and give it freedom in the temple pond. This seems also to bring luck to the person doing that.