Hutongs and Lama Temple - first Sunday in Beijing

The market
In the morning I met Barbara ( a nice Malaysian women I had made acquaintance with). She had offered to show me where I can buy some real Chinese foodstuff including the wet market. The market mainly is open in the morning so we already met at 8:30 am.
The market was small but offered a huge variety of vegetables, fruits and also some seafood. The other place we visited is quite hidden, but is an excellent shopping place - I would describe it as a kind of marketplace - a house in which many foodstands offer raw food. There were a fruit stand, a vegetable stand, a tofu stand, a pork stand, a noodle stand and an egg stand.
I got a bag full of vegetables for 8 yuan (approx. 80 Cent), tofu for 2,50 yuan (25 Cent) and 500 g of freshly made Chinese noodles for 5 yuan (50 Cent).
I'm very happy to know where I can get fresh Chinese foodstuff near my apartment.

The Hutongs
Hutongs are an old infrastructure of old Beijing houses around courtyards and interconnected by small alleys. Houses in Hutongs use to be quite tiny (German: winzig).
Nowadays also due to the coming Olympic Games not much of the original Hutongs is left. A lot of construction work is currently taking place in some of the most famous old Hutongs. I think that's maybe an advantage for hygiene, but still it's a pity because the atmosphere in an old hutong is unique.
I had the chance to still see some of the remainders today. I saw some real hutongs - old, and where Chinese people live (didn't see any tourists apart from me in these alleys) as well as I saw the tourist hutongs with all the construction work going on and where nearly every second house is a tourist shop and the alleys are crowded with rikscha drivers indulgently offering their services (Shichahai area).
Near the Shichahai area I climbed up the steep chairs of Gulou (the drum tower) and enjoyed the view over the old parts of town, but I could also see how many houses had been knocked down (German: abgerissen).

Yonghegong, the Lama temple

The most impressing two things about this temple are:
1. The last hall with the huge Maitreya-Bodhisvatta. The buddha is so big that you feel tiny next to it. Resembles me somehow of the Christian religion where they also wanted to freighten people by the size of church towers.
2. The culture mixture between Tibetan-Mongolian lamaism (a belief) and Chinese culture. This could be seen by the fact that many inscriptions were in four languages: Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Manchurian.

So much for today's report.