Ritan Park

    "The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B."

~James Yorke~

     I am finding this statement to be more and more true the longer we live here :)  I can pretty much plan on our "Plan A" not working out.  So we are getting better at plan B's and plan C's and being flexible enough to jump back to plan A at a moments notice :)

   Well, Rob is still travelling for work, this time over the weekend (which is fairly uncommon).  So instead of hunkering down at home with the kids and a movie we decided to be adventurous and conquer the city on our own!  We did some research and used the Beijing Kids guide to find an activity we all would enjoy.  Miniture Golf was the winner!  And we found a miniture golf place at one of the oldest historic parks in Beijing named Ritan Park. Bonus - Fun and History/Sightseeing together!  If only it worked out that way...

     Ritan Park is also known as the Temple of the Sun.  The park was home to one of the four royal altars during dynastic times.  It was built about 1530 AD around an altar that was used to worship the sun gods.  It's a very peaceful park and also has a big children's area in the center with small rides, bounce houses, a fishing pond, playground, rock wall and supposedly miniture golf.

     It was a beautiful day. We wandered around the park for a while, then went on a wild goose chase trying to track down the location of the miniture golf place.  There were signs with arrows that we followed to nowhere.  My charade skills apparantly need to be polished because nobody understood what I was trying to ask them :) Until after wandering for about an hour with tired, frustrated kids, we ran across a rock-wall climber from down-under who informed us that the golf course was no longer there...nice.  We were even using recent articles that said the park had mini-golf :/ 

     So we did this instead

     The park had this little pond (I really had to look past the color of the water), and the kids had a ball (haha) running around in the little water wheels.  So we did this until they had run the equivalent of a half-marathon :) then decided to go see a movie at the theater because it was starting to rain now so we needed to head indoors.  We had heard about a kids movie coming out in the states that they really wanted to see, so we drove across town to the theater I knew only to find that it wasn't released in China yet :( and there weren't any other movies playing that were family friendly at the time...

   Plan C: We had heard about this pottery place really close to our neighborhood called "Happy Land Pottery" we decided to give it a try.  We found it pretty easily and the kids loved being able to work in the clay and make their own pottery.  They were awesome!  For about 80 Yuan (about $13-$14 USD) you can do anything you want for an hour or 120 Yuan ($20) for an hour and a half.  You can make as much pottery as you want, they also have coloring, painting, candle making, sand art, beads and other crafts.  The kids each came away with 3 different pottery pieces and a sand-art candle.  They loved it!  They keep asking to go back.  Plan C=Success!!

  China lesson #31....... BE FLEXIBLE

p.s. my heat did not run out :) YAY!  We had enough to heat us up some hot cocoa and watch a movie on what turned out to be a rainy day!!