Afternoon and night

We continued back to Beijing. One more stop for those who wanted, others could go directly to the hotel.

Olympic Park

Zuzka wanted to see Bird's Nest, she was interested from architectural point of view. Se we opted for it. When we are already in Beijing, why not. I can pretend I am interested in sports... And with a bit of luck I will get some good photo opportunities from different areas.

This is as close as I ever got to sport. Seriously! Really!

This is what I meant with photo opportunities.

Finally I understand why Great Wall was not crowded at all. Everybody is here!
    

There are also other interesting buildings in the area. With only one difference. We did not pay entrance fee to see them (and spent more time in queues). Whole this venue is very good business.

Swimming pool is probably not the best name for it, but let's stay with it.

And one more stadium.

Night in Beijing & The Egg

Most of people from our group went to Beijing Opera in the evening. We, however, being warned about Chinese opera decided to go to see more of architecture.

Our plan was to go to see the building of National Centre for the Performing Arts (so our program very close to culture too!). It was still light and we wanted to get there after night fall, so that we could see the illumination of it. On the other hand it was quite far - about 45min of walking, so with one diversion for shops in nicely lit shopping street we got there "exactly as we wanted". (BTW, whole this trip was quite anti-shopping oriented, that I like and applaud to, so when we wanted to buy some silk shirt for me we had to do it "under cover" :-) ).

Arrows Tower, part of former fortification of Beijing, it is very close to Tiananmen Square. Now only to find out how to cross that wide road.

I did not like The Mausoleum of Chairman Mao yesterday, but with lights it looks better.

We have found the Egg! It was sitting there in the middle of pool. I do not know how people get in, probably by some tunnel. We did not have enough time to explore it and we did not want to irritate police any more...

It was quite dark, and I am not able to handhold 8sec exposure so I taken out my small gorilla tripod I have bought for this trip. The first photo I have taken while lying on the pavement, then I decided to find more convenient place.

The pool was surrounded by nice and convenient brim, where I could put my tripod and crouch next to it. I hesitated only for a second and stepped over barrier chain surrounding the pool completely.

While taking probably 10th photo at the 4th location Zuzka called at me and I have noticed policeman standing next to her, not looking very friendly. He did not say anything (it would not help much if he did). Later Zuzka told me there were more policemen going around before, but they were more tolerant. So convenient shooting was over. We did not risk it again, any time we got closer to barrier police was not far behind. But we were not alone, they had a lot of intruders to handle.

Probably at 10pm illumination was over. So we headed back to hotel. Another 45 minutes through nice and less nice streets (if only we did not need to walk around big roads and searched for crossing place).

We returned quite late, but we still could not go to bed, because we needed to pack. Tomorrow morning we are heading to Lhasa!