Toronto Treats: Exploring the City with Tasty Tours

Mmm, truffles. How can you resist them?

One of the things I`ve been up to since getting back to Toronto has been joining Tasty Tours Toronto as one of the guide staff. Tasty Tours is an nifty little company offering walking tours of Toronto that focus mostly on the deliciousness available at Toronto's bakeries and chocolatiers.

Some of the wonderfully delicious treats on offer on our chocolate tour.
This is quite possibly my favourite stop, with chocolates ranging in flavour from lavender and rose to chipotle, tequila and lime. 

Tours are kept small to maximize your enjoyment and run every, or every other, weekend depending on the season. Regular tours include the Kensington Sweets Tour and the Trinity-Bellwoods Chocolate Tour. People keep asking which is my favourite or which they should try first and, honestly, I can't decide. My answer? Do both!

One of the customer favourites on the sweets tour. Know what they are? Good. Then you probably want one :).

Taste testing is offered at all of the stops along the route and, even if, like me, you're a dessert-o-phile, you will find something new and awesome that you've never tried before or an excellently made well-loved favourite at every stop.

One of the chocolate truffles from our sweets tour.
This one was pumpkin spice, but you'll get to choose your flavour.

While the focus of the tour is mostly on the desserts, we don't skimp on the historical info either. Little tidbits about the neighbourhood, sweet making techniques and how to properly eat desserts abound. The guides are all knowledgeable (yeah, yeah, I know, tooting my own horn - but I did do my undergrad thesis on why we evolved to love sweetness and how cultures use and perceive it differently around the world!) and the neighbourhoods themselves are wonderfully unique. Plus, you don't have to be a tourist to enjoy them. Most of the tours are actually made up of locals who just want to better get to know the city and treats available in it!

I bet those who have been to Asia can identify some of these!
Just to keep up some of the suspense, I'll avoid telling which tour this stop is from.

Interested? Check us out at TastyToursToronto.com. Private tours are available for those who can't make the regular ones or, those who just want to spend some quality sweet time with their friends. Special thematic tours are also offered during dessert-heavy seasons such as Christmas and Valentine's, and tours are half-price for those going with a friend during their birth month.

Don't trust me to be impartial? Check out some of our excellent reviews on TripAdvisor.

Happy Eating!

Food & Drink in Japan!

Sorry for the brief hiatus there, these past two weeks of packing have been a little bit hectic. Today however, I am free to return to my pictures from Japan and discuss one of my favourite topics - FOOD!

A bowl of typical Japanese Miso Ramen, with the traditional broth, thin soba (thin buckwheat) noodles, flavouring vegetables and two slices of pork on top. Completely diferent from Korean ramyeon, but oh so delicious! Soba noodles can also be fried or served as ramen in oil broth, but miso was by far my favourite.

As I may have mentioned (raved about) in my post on Osaka, Japan - and particularly the Kansai region of Japan - does nothing if it does not do food well. In contrast to the typically chili-laden, heavily spiced Korean food I've grown used to, Japanese food is much (much) milder, with much of it not being spicy at all.   Japanese dishes are typically also saltier than their Korean counterparts, with more miso-y, soy flavours.

A variation on the traditional Japanese Shabu-Shabu (hotpot). This one contains thinly sliced pork, tofu, mushrooms, cabbage and udon (thick buckwheat) noodles cooked in soy milk. Although I was initially skeptical, it turned out to be mouthwateringly yummy :).  

Street food, such as takoyaki (battered and fried octopus balls) which mentioned in my post on Osaka, also plays and extremely important role in Japanese eating culture. A more substantial meal-sized version of takoyaki also exits. Okonomiyaki, which literally means 'whatever you want grilled' is a large savoury pancake made by mixing together - well, whatever ingredients you want - and frying them up in batter. This can be done either by your server or, by yourself at a hotplate table in certain restaurants. It is quite delicious and is a Kansai specialty, although Hiroshima is also known for having its own version in which the pancake, egg and other ingredients are not mixed prior to frying and are then served on top of a plate of noodles. I found that I much preferred the Kansai variation, though I have a number of friends who disagreed.

Okonomiyaki ingredients prior to mixing, the white buble-like things in the top left corner of the bowl (can bowls have corners?) are actually bits of tempura.

The result post-fry up, complete with okonomiyaki sauce (think sweetened Worcester sauce) , seaweed  flakes and dried fish flakes (usually bonito) on top. In the corner. Japanese mayonnaise is also a classic topping, although the portrait being drawn by one of my friends at the table is a little more atypical.

Of course, in the eyes of most people, one has not truly discussed Japanese food unless one has mentioned one of two things - Sushi, or Green Tea. I am happy to report that I consumed both while on my trip, and that both are indeed delicious when consumed in their native land.

Mini-squid sushi at a conveyor belt sushi place in Kyoto. Between my friend and I, many many plates of sushi were consumed. This was the final plate and it rocked! More 'normal' varieties were also offered.

While in Tokyo, I was lucky enough to have my lovely friend Ayumi take me out and insist that I try some traditional Japanese green matcha tea. We also had tasty brown rice tea, but it is the matcha that truly sticks. Matcha is thicker and frothier than typical green tea and is made directly from boiled finely powdered leaves (as opposed to steeping them). It has a surprisingly deep, rich, unsweetened taste which made me question why it is not always consumed in this way!

A bowl of matcha served with lightly flavoured agar (gelatin)-based desserts in a sweet syrup with soybean powder. Definitely a must have. 

In addition to providing great food, Japanese restaurants (particularly in Tokyo) can often be done up with quite quirky and fun themes. Here I am sharing a meal with friends in what is essentially an over-sized Christmas ornament!

Thanks guys! You rock :)!

Feeling the Vibe in Osaka

Although this might come as a surprise to those who know me, the glitzy, fashion conscious, shiny new building- and shopping arcade-filled urban knot that is Osaka actually turned out to be my favourite stop of the trip - a stop which I sincerely wish could have lasted longer!

Osaka's Umeda Sky Building. Home to both an indoor and outdoor observation deck (the latter 173m above ground), my favourite aspect of visiting was taking the escalators which connect the two legs of the building and span a height of 5 stories. I may have enjoyed this too much as I made Osaka local Yugi ride up and down them with me several times.  

A young boy gazes in wonder at the Pikachu on the screen at Osaka's Pokemon Centre. The place to go to buy anything Poke-related, the Pokemon Centre is located on the 13th floor of the Diamaru Department Store, one of the many glitzy department stores surrounding Osaka Station.

In many ways, Osaka's cityscape can be said to be much like Tokyo's. Like Tokyo, Osaka is a coastal city that does not seem like one; and, like Tokyo, much, if not all, of the old city was destroyed during the last world war, making space for gleaming new high-rises and fancy shopping centres. Yet somehow, the two are not the same at all. Maybe it was all the neon, or maybe it was just in the more laid-back attitude that seemed to roll of those living there, but to me, Osaka just seemed to beat with this incredibly addicting pulse that Tokyo lacked. It was basically everything I expected a modern Japanese city to be - and more.

Some of the bright neon lights in Shin-Sekai, the area in which I stayed. Described as 'a world that time forgot, home to ancient pachinko parlours, rundown theaters, dirt-cheap restaurants and all manner of raffish and suspicious characters' by the Lonely Planet, I found that I loved this area just as much as I did the much newer and happening Shimbashi & Namba areas (the latter of which is pictured further down). In the centre of this photo is Osaka's Tsuten-kaku, originally built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1969 after the war, at only 103m high, it's actually much shorter than a number of the buildings around it. 

One of said gaming parlours. These establishments can be found in numbers on nearly every shopping street in Osaka, and they always seem to contain players of every conceivable age range.

The road leading to Osaka-jo. Although Osaka is home to a number of excellent museums, Osaka Castle is the only real 'historical site' in the city (disregarding the lovely ruins of an earlier fortification located to the northwest of it that all those not-archaeologically-minded are likely to ignore). A 1931 concrete reconstruction of Tokugawa Ieyasu's 17th century castle (which itself was a reconstruction of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's late 16th century 'impregnable' granite castle destroyed by the Tokugawa forces), Osaka-jo offers not only an excellent view of the city from the top floor, but a nice museum filled with artifacts and detailed explanations of who's who and what they did as it relates to the history of the castle and shogunate.

If Osaka is famous for one thing over anything else, it is food - and boy does Osaka do food! (And here is where all those who know me are nodding in sudden comprehension of my love for this city - okay, so I'll admit, the food may have had something to do with it, but it wasn't only the food, I swear!). Osaka also doesn't just do food, it does it in both quality and quantity - lots of quantity. With entire areas of the city seemingly dedicated to nothing else, I, who am rarely ever full, managed to happily achieve that distinction and more.


Trademark Osaka Takoyaki - battered octopus balls. I've loved these since I first tried them in Taiwan. Osaka is said to have the best. There is an entire restaurant-museum dedicated to these in the Odaiba area of Tokyo.

A Lively shopping district during the day, the Minami area, comprised of Shinshabashi and Namba seems to really come alive at night. In the Shimbashi area to the north of the Yodo River, small exclusive looking bars and clubs are the name of the day (er... night.), while to the south in Dotombori and Namba, it's food, food and more food. I was lucky enough to head out this way on my first night in search of a late dinner and, although it was a Monday, by 10 or 11pm both areas were full of life in the form of the young and eccentrically dressed - fashion in Osaka is taken seriously (I had and old man look at me disparagingly for having such insufficient fashion sense that I was wearing slightly flared jeans in this day and age) and the aim seems to be to look unique. I can't even begin to describe the results of this drive, but it was one of the things that I loved about the city.
 

One of the food filled streets in Osaka's Namba-Dotonbori District. I think this is how I imagine heaven.

While much of what I loved about Osaka was its loud unabashed liveliness, one of my favourite things about wandering around its side streets in search of some new delicacy was stumbling upon some of its quieter places. It was those places that really brought home that this was a city that was both loved by those here and well lived in.

Like many of the other small charming shrines and temples frequented by locals in Osaka, Hozen-ji was located down an alley-way off one of the shopping arcades (in this instance, off one of the arcades to the south of Dotombori). Unique from many of the other Buddhist temples I saw while in Japan, Hozen-ji is centred around a statue of Mizukake Fudo that has been completely covered in moss due to the practice of sprinkling it with water in order to ensure the granting of a wish.

A Week in School Lunches

Since so many people have asked me what we are fed for lunch at school, I decided to do a post about a week's worth of middle school lunches. It should be noted that we eat the same things as the kids - though they always complain that we get more, which, to be fair, is true, they don't get to go back for seconds ;).



Going clockwise from 12 o'clock, we have pork stewed in vegetables and oyster sauce (굴소스돈육불고기), a spiced mixed green and onion salad (가랏겉절이), kimchi and bean sprout soup (김치콩나물국), rice with barley (보리밥), and dried fish and almonds in a sweet and spicy dressing (아몬드쥐손채볶음) - Soo yummy! There was also yogurt served with this meal, but as a lactose intolerant, I did not partake.

School lunches in Korea (and much of Asia) always seem to be served in these specialised metal trays. The smaller deeper bowls at the top are for your side dishes, or banchan (반찬), while the shallower, more central indentation is meant for the main dish. The usages of these three receptacles do seem to be somewhat interchangeable however - particularly if the main course is saucy or there is a flat side or dessert served.
 

Tuesdays main dish was mackerel in a boiled kimchi sauce (묵은지고등어조림). (I cannot adequately express my love). As sides, there were Lotus roots simmered in sweetened soy sauce with toasted sesame seeds (연근조림 - top right), the ever-present kimchi (also top right) and spicy chicory, cucumber and octopus salad (치커리오이초무침 - top left and sooo good!). This was accompanied by a baby clam, potato, noodle and vegetable soup (바지락감자수제비국 - also delicious) and 'eco' brown rice (친환경현미밥). Dessert (not pictured here for intolerance reasons) was 'creamy cheese corn' (옥수수콘치즈구이). Apparently it's very tasty. I'm not so sure. 


The lower two bowls are reserved for rice and soup. The rice is always placed on the left and the soup on the right. Don't mix these up, you will get a ridiculously large number of strange looks if you do! (And this from people who didn't flinch when I started photographing my lunches!). As with all Korean meals, you are also given a spoon and chopsticks. The spoon is for both the soup and rice, while the chopsticks are for everything else. Eating your rice with chopsticks will garner you looks just as strange as if you'd put your soup in the wrong bowl.


Occasionally, the main dish, due to it's nature, will need to be placed in one of the larger slots - or, as in this case, in a bowl in one of the larger slots - in that case, many Koreans will simply fill one of the banchan bowls with rice. In this photo, the main course is in the bottom left-hand corner and is a Korean-ified Chinese dish called Jajangmyeon (자장면), or noodles with peas, carrots and beef cubes in black bean sauce. As sides we had a fried breaded shrimp in a sweet and spicy chili-peanut sauce (깐쇼새우 - sooo good!), cabbage kimchi, cubed radish kimchi (깍두기 김치), and sweet (yellow) pickled radish (단무지). The soup was (oddly not listed on the menu) a broth with shrimp, seaweed and green onions. In the top right corner you can see some asian pear (배) for dessert.

 Both rice and soup are present at every meal (even when I don't take any as the main dish is noodle based as above). The rice is left plain so that you can used it too soothe your poor tongue should any of the other food prove to be too spicy (as is often the case - though I am also partial to mixing my sides into my rice). The soup can also be used to serve this important function. It's mainly there for another reason however, Koreans don't believe in drinking water while eating! (Though they do believe in drinking alcohol... hmm...) This is so that you have space in your stomach for food. Water is often drunk after the meal. I don't know about you, but personally, I get thirsty when I eat!


In this instance, my main dish is located in the top left corner bowl, and it is absolutely delectable steam-braised pork short ribs stewed with dates and grapes (돼지갈비찜). The sides on offer included the inevitable kimchi (not pictured here), salad with chili-paste dressing (성추겉저리), whole rice (쌀밥), and seaweed soup (미역국). For dessert, we had delicious almond and orange rind cake and oranges.


Another element which is present at every meal is kimchi (김치), or fermented cabbage dressed in spicy chili sauce. While I don't necessarily add it to my dish every time, a number of the other teachers will fill their banchan bowls to overflowing with kimchi (and look curiously at me when I don't - similarly, they always say I don't take enough rice!). If you look carefully at the upper right hand bowl two pictures above, you'll notice that I not only had normal cabbage kimchi, but kkadugi (깍두기 김치), or cubed radish, kimchi as well.

And for the final platter, we had seafood patties in oyster sauce (해물동그랑땡 - a lot more delicious than you might expect!). Our sides were wasabi beansprout and crab salad (와사비 콩나물무침), kimchi and tiny dried whole anchovies in a spicy sweetened sesame sauce (멸치 조림 - also a lot better than you might think!). Rice was plan white, while the soup was a variation of my favourite - jjigae! In this case, it was tuna jjigae (참치 찌개) but pork, beef and kimchi jjigae are all also common.

Overall, I find my school lunches to be varied and super delicious - all the more so as they only run me 3,000 (or $2.75 US) per day. This is likely a good thing as eating lunch in the cafeteria alongside all of the students and other teachers is seen as being an integral aspect of participation in school life. This is so much the case that it is seen as terribly rude to leave the table before everyone in your group is finished - especially if that would leave one person sitting alone.

잘 먹겠습니다!

(Jal Mokgetsumnida! - Eat Well!)

Author's Note: A Massive THANK YOU! to science teacher 박형도 for helping me identify and name all of the foods!!! 감사합니다!!!

Bibimbap!

So it seems that now that hiking season is coming to a close, I've turned to blogging about one of my other favourite things - FOOD! Or, in this particular instance Bibimbap (비빔밥)!
 

A photo of my school's bibimbap. You may not be able to see all the ingredients, but this one includes rice, fermented radish strips (buried under the rice), mushrooms, bracken fern stems (고사리 - gosari), soybean sprouts, zucchini, seaweed, lettuce, sesame seeds, sesame oil and gochujang (fermented red chili paste) with ground meat. It's delicious, if it doesn't look it, I'll take the blame. I'm the one who prepared it ;).

Bibimbap literally means 'mixed rice' ('bibim' means 'mixed' and 'bap' means 'rice'). It's a dish you will find all over Korea in a number of variations. In Jeonju (전주), Jeollabuk-do province this variation includes a raw egg and is said be how it was traditionally served during the Joseon Dynasty. Another variation is Stone Pot Bibimbap (돌솥 비빔밥- dolsot bibipbap) which is served in a (surprise!) steaming hot stone pot. In the northern province of Gangwon-do, wild mountain vegetable bibimbap is the signature dish, while elsewhere beef may also be added. Here in Gwangju, it is also common to stumble upon spicy seafood bibimbap, which is one of my favourite variations.

The above bowl once mixed. This is making me ridiculously hungry.

Wherever you eat it, there are a few ingredients which will almost inevitably be present. The first, and most obvious of these, is rice, but a good bibimbap will also contain zucchini, cucumber, spiced radish strips, mushrooms, soybean sprouts, seaweed, bellflower root, bracken fern stems, sesame seeds and oil and, of course spicy chili pepper paste (often this is 고추장 - Gochujang, or fermented red pepper paste). Bibimbap is almost always served unmixed, with the ingredients arrayed attractively around the bowl. In many restaurants, the rice will be served in a separate lidded cup. It is up to the customer to mix it to their satisfaction.

Ddeok! A delicious Korean rice-based dessert.

While the above picture is not of bibimbap, it is of an equally typical Korean dish - Ddeok (떡), or rice cake. This particular assortment was given to one of the other teachers in my office as a 'thank you' from one of her student's parents. The giving of ddeok in thanks, in celebration or as a parting gift is a fairly common practice in Korea. In its most basic form, ddeok is made from glutinous rice flour and can take on many forms - both sweetened and not. In the above picture, both forms are intended to be eaten as a dessert or snack. To left is ggul tteok (꿀떡), or honey and sesame filled ddeok, while to the right is injeolmi (인절미), or steamed and pounded rice cake coated with soybean powder. Both are delicious.

Persimmons!

So it's now nearly December and I have yet to do a post on what has quickly become one of my favourite features of fall in Korea (see what I did there?) - Persimmons!

A 단감 (dan gam) or fuyu persimmon - washed and awaiting my consumption.

I have to be honest, before coming to Korea, I had little - if any - notion of what, exactly, a persimmon was. I think I knew that it was some kind of fruit, and I recall having some vague idea that people ate them dried, but I could not have told you where they were from, what they looked like or how they tasted (nor when they were ripe or why people ate them if it came to that).

One of the persimmon treas at Baegyangsa in Naejangsan National Park.

I am happy to say that all of this has now been rectified. I now know that persimmons - or 'Gam' (감) with a hard 'k'-like 'g' as they are known here - are an amazingly delicious and wonderfully fantastic fruit that no one should ever have to live without. I love them. I want to eat them all the time.  Not enough of an explanation for you? I suppose I could try to go in for a little more detail ;).

More persimmons, all for me! Their exteriors are waxy cuticles that are reminiscent of the skin off an apple - though slightly tougher - and just as edible. Many Koreans will peel and slice their persimmons. This requires more patience than I care to exhibit.

Before I go any further, I suppose I should mention that there are actually two types of persimmon available in Korea. Hachiya persimmons (떫은감 - tteolbeun gam or 'sour persimmon') are deep orange, sweet, soft and pulpy when ripe, but very bitter before that. By contrast, fuyu persimmons (단감 - dan gam or 'sweet persimmon') are lighter orange in colour and have a crisp melon-like texture, they are also (rather entertainingly because of their name) less sweet. Having not yet tried the hyachiya persimmons, it is the fuyu persimmons that have so captured my heart (and tongue). As far as I'm concerned, they taste exactly like Christmas - or, rather, how I imagine Christmas would taste were it made into an edible flavour. It's like having melon, pumpkin and cinnamon-y pie spice all mixed into a deliciously delectable fruity bundle. I was initially hesitant to give them a try as I am what is often referred to as a 'texture person', being rather picky with my food in that department, but I am so glad I did! When just ripe, fuyu persimmons have an apple-like texture. From there, they migrate toward melon-like as they get less crisp. Interestingly, just like tomatoes (which they actually resemble quite closely), persimmons are technically berries. Sadly they are only available for a very limited period of time, appearing at local markets in early fall and disappearing again around this time (early December). Happily, when they are around, they're around in an abundance - and I plan to eat my fill!

Having a Blast in Beijing

As Beijing provides one of the only ports of entry into North Korea, the city was initially labeled in my mind as a 'necessary stop-over' on my North Korean holiday (bet that was a sentence no one ever expected to read!). As I had a few extra days on either end of my trip and other friends who would also be passing through Beijing around the same time (and, who were actually planning to visit it) as well as a friend from highschool who was living there, I decided that maybe I should take five days to look around and explore.

Best decision I could have made. I ended up loving Beijing, when at best I'd assumed I'd just like it immensely. Perhaps I should explain, I had nothing against going to Beijing, in fact, I knew for certain that I wanted to go at some point. I also knew, however, that I would likely end up spending quite a bit of time there on later travels and did not wish to over-see it. Looks like that one's not an issue! 5 days was no where near enough! Oh, don't get me wrong, there are bad sides, the massive crowds, the pollution (which fortunately was not too bad while we were there), the summer humidity (also no where near as bad as usual) and the fact that most people just push and shove their way around you. But I just ended up loving the grittiness of it. The multi-layered history, shiny modernity and grimy-underbellied-ness of it. I also loved the contrasts between it and Seoul. People have often told me that Seoul is just a dirtier version of the major Japanese cities (not having been to Japan, I wouldn't know). If that's the case, then Beijing is their much much dirtier (I'm thinking just rolled around in the mud and then jumped in a sand pit-dirty) cousin. But it's also so much more than that. And it's not that it's 'dirtier' per se, it's more that you can feel the accumulated weight of centuries living side by side with you in an enclosed space. Or maybe it's just that, as the older narrower parts of the city act as both tourist attractions and residential areas, it's impossible to have that wide-boulevard shiny-clean feeling everywhere - well, except for where they've torn the old traditional residential hutongs down and put in glossy new purely retail ones. Thankfully they've stopped doing that due to public outcries. And it's definitely better that way, it's that closed in sense of breathing in life the way it's lived that makes Beijing so special - and I wouldn't have liked it nearly so much with out it. Then again, after living in conservative Korean society, it could also just have been the nonchalance of all the old men sitting out in the summer heat with their shirts rolled up to their armpits and their beer bellies exposed that attracted me to the city - but somehow I don't think that was the case :P.

A walk - Qianmen to Donghuamen

 I just loved this guy. The old hutong area near my hostel (located to the west of the
touristified Qianmen hutong area)

Your pick of communist paraphernalia

Bordering Tienanmen Square on the south side, this is Qianmen (literally 'front gate') or, more properly, Zhengyangmen. It was built in 1419 during the Ming dynasty and from then onward formed the southern entrance to the inner city (and therefore acted as the guardian of the entrance to the imperial city). It was, and still is, the tallest of the gatehouses and was the gate through which major processions passed. While the walls no longer stand, passing through security at the subway Qianmen station in order to cross the road and enter Tiananmen makes it feel as though they still do!

Monument to the People's Heroes, Tiananmen Square

The Beijing National Museum (a must do when I return)

Awaiting the changing of the guard (sadly not as impressive as one might expect)  while looking toward Tiananmen (that's the name of the main gate into the imperial city, built in 1415) and a portrait of Mao

Tiananmen

The delicacies on offer on Donghuamen Market Street (yes, those are incredibly tiny sharks you can see there!)

And moving a little further down the line, we come to...

We weren't entirely sure what gave these particular centipedes their 'diet' designation 

Snake! I wanted to try, but was sadly too full from dinner. Ah well, next time! 

These I did not want to try. We later came across a vendor skewering them alive 

My friends, it would seem, had no such reservations... I blame this on the fact that they're South African *insert sage nodding here* 

Mmm, delicious!
No, really. They assured me that they were not at all bad, much tastier than silk worn larvae (hard not to be) apparently. 

Maybe it's just me... but don't you think they look a little too crunchy to be appetizing?

Tiananmen by night.

A stream of kites - you see these sold everywhere in the evenings.

The Great Wall!
Made from a series of walls, ditches and other types of defensive fortifications, the Great Wall was built in various stages and phases, always with an eye toward protecting China's northern flank from invaders. While it fell into occasional disuse when invaders occasionally over whelmed the wall and took power, it's construction spanned millennia, beginning in the 7th century BC and continuing (sporadically) up to the early 17th century AD.

(A brief note here: It was amazing! I want to go back! Heck, I wanted to stay and just keep trekking it forever! We got lucky and our hostel was offering tours to a not-quite-yet-open portion of the wall near the Shixia Pass. It was both stunning and thankfully void of the massive amounts of tourists that we could see en route swarming the battlements at Badaling. Even nicer, however, was the fact that after some trekking, we made it passed the soon-to-be-open reconstructed portion of the wall and onto the unreconstructed portion. It was both great to see and loads of fun to hike!)

Climbing the Great Wall. 

Yup, climbing.

Looking out the guard tower at the view of the ancient Mongol side.

Sorry, there are going to be a lot of these - it was just so breathtaking!

Those are trees, not grass, brushing the walls.

Starting to get rougher.

The white bit in the top left shows you how far we've come.
So gorgeous. One day, I'm going to hike the whole route... or try to anyhow.

Not tired enough from our activities, we decided to walk to and climb the hill in Jingshan Park for a view of the sunset over the Forbidden City

A view of the top. Jingshan park lies directly north of the Forbidden City and used to be an imperial garden. It's is now a public park most notable for it wonderful views, dinosaur collection (seriously) and as the location of the suicide of Emperor Chongzhen (the last of the Ming Dynasty emperors) upon hearing that the wall had been breached in 1644. Rather impressively, the hill was constructed during the Ming dynasty for Feng Shui purposes and as a repository for all of the soil excavated during the building of the moat around the imperial palace. 

Looking westward.

Looking northward

Looking eastward toward the shiny new business district of Beijing 

And, finally, southward, over the Forbidden City

A gatehouse and the moat. Beautiful.

The Forbidden City & North

A lion guards one of the main pavilions at the Hall of Supreme Harmony 

In the outer court

Peace within the throngs

The Hall of Central Harmony (left) and the Hall of Preserving Harmony (right) 

and to capture the colours...

There's something charming about a decaying ruin. Not so charming that I'd want the Forbidden City to rot though! 

The Imperial Garden

North (and out)ward toward Jingshan

The Lama Temple

The entryway

Originally built in 1694 as a residence for the Qing  Dynasty Court eunuchs, it did not become a temple until 1722. Now a lamasery (a monastery for Tibetan Buddhist monks) the Lama (or Yonghe) Temple is one of the most important Tibetan Buddhist Temples outside of Tibet. It is considered the national centre for Lama administration by the Chinese government.

The Hall of Harmony and Peace

It's centrepiece, a 26m tall Maitreya Buddha built from a single white sandalwood tree. 

Incense for prayers

a view of the roof

Durian with friends. Yes, that is a normal reaction... 

The Northward to the Lakes

The Shichahai nightlife. The area is absolutely lovely, lively any time of day and composed of three joint lakes: Qianhai, Xihai and Houhai bordered by hutong areas and historic sights.

lucky crickets anyone?

The Tea Master in his shop. Well worth a visit. Will post the address as soon as I find it again. 

The Temple of Heaven

Used by many successive dynasties to perform ancestor worship and prayers for good harvest, the Temple of Heaven was originally built under the directive of the Ming Yongle Emperor (who is also responsible for the construction of the Forbidden City) from 1406 to 1420 and later renovated in the 16th and 18th centuries.

A peak at the Hall for Prayer of Good Harvests. The grounds surrounding the Temple are absolutely massive and are used by locals for all many of sports, activities and gatherings.

The Hall for Prayer of Good Harvests

Peaking over the wall

Looking back through the gates whilst crossing the 360m Vermilion Steps Bridge. 

and south to the Imperial Vault of Heaven.

The Imperial Vault

Looking up.

The Summer Palace

A Ching Dynasty (17th-early 20th centuries AD) retreat consisting of gardens, temples & pavilions built on and alongside Longevity Hill (Wanshou Shan) and Kunming Lake, it's difficult - if not impossible - not to love this place.

A view to the East after entering the northern gate.

The matching west-ward view.

Hiking Longevity Hill.

A view from the top. Overlooking the Temple of Buddhist Tenets. 

Sea of Wisdom Temple at the top

The Temple of Buddhist Virtue with Kunming Lake behind.

Boats!

Looking up toward the Temple of Buddhist Virtue from the Cloud Dispelling Hall. 

The Cloud Dispelling Hall

Kuming lake and Empress Dowanger Cixi's Marble Boat (actually built during the 18th century reign of the Qianlong Emperor and restored by Cixi in the late 19th century)

The view from our pedal boat

Looking out toward South Lake Isle and the Dragon King's Temple 

Forward toward the Wenchang (Flourishing Culture) Pavilion

At the Zhichun (Perceiving the Spring) Pavilion.

The perfect way to end a day.

and, last, but never least:

The Birds Nest Stadium by night.