Temple of Peace and Pandas
Trip Start
Mar 31, 2012
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Trip End
Apr 10, 2012
Beijing, China
Thursday, April 5, 2012
The Temple of Peace is a large park with pagoda buildings which the Emperor used to visit for periods of abstinence of 'alcohol, women and meat'. Each temple has small, gargoyle-like animal carvings on the roof; the more carvings, the more important the building. The most we've seen up to now is eight but there can be as many as twelve.
In the afternoon we took a taxi to the Beijing Zoo to see the pandas! We arrived to an organised chaos and had no idea how to get our tickets or where the queues began, so we went native and pushed and shoved until we were in front of the counter. When we got inside there was a large panda enclosure with several areas including, 'The Olympic Panda House' (unfortunately we didn't see any pandas doing pole vault/ long jump) and 'The Asian Panda House'. The crowds were enormous and the Chinese are proud of their national symbol. Leaving the zoo, we walked through one of the many busy subways of the city. We were overwhelmed by the makeshift stores on the side of the walkways where you can buy a hot snack or perhaps a puppy!
Today we have our teacher conference. We have been divided into groups to talk about different aspects ofTteaching and Learning. Miss Finn will be talking about learning objectives in her group with Miss Wilde, and Miss Loftus will be taking her group through teacher preparation. In the afternoon, we have a 20 minute slot to speak about our Dickens project. There will be approximately 120 people attending.....wish us luck in our Public Speaking Debut!
