Day 6

Today we went to the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, ate Peking duck and watched an amazing acrobatics show. The Summer Palace is very large, and is the king’s palace in the summer. The Kunming Lake covers most of it, which we crossed in a dragon boat. For lunch, we had Peking duck at a fancy restaurant, which was very tasty. The temple of heaven is where the king went, annually, for a worship ceremony to pray for good harvest. It also has a wishing stone which grants one wish to the person standing on it. Many of us such as Felix (who earned 16 yuan), Lawrence, Nathan and Lachlan took pictures with girls when we had free time to explore. We watched an acrobatics show called ‘the wonderful Han’. They did many amazing tricks and acts but the highlights were the death ball and an act that involved some metal structure, which looked like police cuffs. Those two acts were very interesting, it made us all gaze in awe and stood out a lot compared to the other acts which had minor mistakes that had been very obvious. One of the awesome acts where a ball that had 5 motorcyclists doing tricks inside out; like driving upside down and on the side of the walls. It got really crowded with 5 motorcyclists and looked like some people would get seriously hurt but you could tell that the cyclists had been practicing for ages to get this right on the day. The police cuffs also looked like it was also very dangerous. The police cuff was rotating at high velocity and the performer acted out stunts that no one in their right mind would do unless they had been practicing like he did, he even went blindfolded and also juggled with pins (without the blindfold) while walking free hand on the rotating, huge police cuffs. The acrobatic acts were so cool and looked impossible to us and everyone else watching and you can tell the time it took for them to get it just right. The ride home was not long at all because we had all been exhausted and had a chance to sing with everyone on the bus in unison.