We went to Beijing Botanical Garden last weekend…strolling the summer days as the flowers start blossoming.

 

It was quite large area…400 hectares, you can spend the entire day just to walk around the complex and it’s not actually only the botanical garden but there’re also Wofu Temple, Memorial of Cao Xueqin, Tomb of Liang Qichao and also several kind of gardens…Perennial Garden, Penjing Garden, Bamboo Garden, Rose Garden and so many other gardens exist within the complex.

The Botanical Garden itself  was not really special to my opinion, only one or two kinds of plants (ex.giant golden barrel) never seen it in Indonesia, the rest was nothing compare to the plants in Indonesia. This made me love my country even more.


The most interesting site for me was The Wofu Temple. Wofu means sleeping, the statue of sleeping Budha in reclining position. I thought there’s one like this in Thailand, right? There’re also 3 statues of Budha representing 3 different aspects, one is representing power/authority, one represents health and another respresents the offspring. So, if one wants to be more succesfull in career/work, that person will pray to Budha who is representing power aspect or if someone wants to have child, he or she can pray to Budha who represents offspring, hoping that Budha will bless him with a good child. It’s really depend on their needs and that’s the reason why I seldom see a person pray before the all Budha.

 

Another interesting thing in the temple was a big bell, the shape is just like a bell we often see in a temple, hanging on a wooden small structure and the club is also made from wood and it’s quite heavy so needs an extra energy with two hands to move the club towards the bell. It was said that if we ring that bell 10 times and in the same time we pray by hearts for our wishes, the wishes shall come true. So I did it, it cost me 3 Yuan just to ring the bell but I didn’t make any wish while ringing the bell.  How stupid I was,  but that’s because I didn’t know the story behind it.  I found out later after Fitrix told me. I rang the bell just because I really wanted to hear the sound made by the bell…but that’s okay…this kind of stupidity was tolerable, right??…hehehehe

Then we were guided to Memorial Place of Cao Xueqin. It was a small, chinese type of old house and as we entered the house, we can see old books, pictures of a man that happened to be Cao Xueqin, old clothes, small miniatures of people and other memorable things left by this man named Cao Xueqin. I was wondering around who this guy actually was…I thought,  it can’t be a king,  there’s no way a king can be this poor (if we’re looking from the house and his estates) and finally figured out that this guy was very popular all over China, this guy wrote 2 very famous love story and one of them is titled "A Dream Of Red Mansion".

 

The story that I really want to read after a friend of mine who just got back from China gave me a page divider. A page divider with coloured pics of 12 beautiful women with short explanation of the character of each woman below. It’s a very very famous story in China and had been translated into so many different languanges including Arabs. I became more excited about this book so I bought one set of this book…why I called it a set ? it’s just because the story is sooo long…consists of 4 books, 140 chapters…can you imagine?…there must be something really special about the story…so I spent 85 Yuan to buy the book, I thought it was a good price if not to be said cheap for a very famous book like this. But somehow, it’s really hard to manage a spare time to read this book since I’m not a type of reader who can read 5 pages today and continue 5 pages tomorrow and on and on…I like to read a book and finish it in one time…because everytime I read a book I always dying to know how the story ends and I won’t be able to tolerate any delay in finding how the story would ends especially on kind of novels like this.

 

Another site we visited was the tomb of Liang Qichao…and this one was a real king…but I forgot from which dynasty he was, there are so many dynasty in China Kingdom History …to be mentioned…there are Qing,Tang,Yuan,Ming dynasty….but those only some of them, the rest is couldn’t be remembered because there are sooo many…I bet none of Chinese people living today able to mention all the dynasties in order and knows the story of each dynasty very well except that person is a student majoring in Chinese history. Not much to tell about the tomb…none of native who came along with us able to tell the story of this king…but I managed to have my self pictured in the front of a tomb,not Liang Qichao tomb, don’t know whose tomb it belongs….Fitrix said that one of the people gathered around that tomb told him that the tomb is belong to a lady, but who or which lady question was left unexplained. So me and Fitrix agreed to call it Princess Cheung Ping’s Tomb;)-….A problem then arouse,Suryadi asked how could I want to get my self pictured in the front of a tomb because according to him, none of sane and healthy people wants to take a picture of their self in the front of a tomb…but Fitrix and I thought…what the heck…later on Suryadi and Edwin will envy us about this photo.