It wasn’t raining on October 5th but it certainly wasn’t a bright sunny day by any means. Air quality wasn’t what I would call  good as it had a white, hazy look to everything in the distance.

All I knew of today’s plan was were going to The China Open to watch tennis with tickets Lucille and Curtis had acquired from a manager at Element Fresh. It pays to be regulars.

We headed to the subway as a usual start to adventure.

We were heading to the Bell and Drum Towers via the Yu’er Hutong. In Beijing, hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan, traditional courtyard residences.

Just a little busier than the subway.

Not as many interesting things to see here as 798 but some stuff for sure.

Either that is a scrawny Smurf or a big blue rat.

The Bell tower came into view and I realized that meant there would be some stairs.

There were stairs alright. I was too tired to take photos of them on the way up.

View from the top of the Drum Tower in another direction.

No danger of getting a sunburn today obviously.

Maybe we can see better inside.

Checked out the cool drums so time to head back down.

More stairs to get to the top of the Bell Tower too. It’s only 70 stairs to get near the top. 70 big steep stairs mind you.

I don’t know how far away from the Bell Tower you can hear the bell but looking at the size of it I’m betting it’s a long way.

As we left the Bell Tower we ran into a group of Canadian Tourists. They had been touring around for a few days and were off to The Great Wall tomorrow. (Spoiler alert; tomorrow is a bad air day so they probably won’t see much of the wall.) We chatted with them for a bit before they had to go for a rickshaw tour of the neighbouring Hutong.

We wandered back into some of the Hutongs to go see about lunch.

By this time we had made our way to Qianhai Lake.

Always something to see in Beijing.

As we walked along we were soon in Houhai Park along Houhai Lake. Houhai is the much larger of the two lakes and it had a lot of stuff going on along it’s shores.

There were lots of people fishing but one guy seemed to take it to the next level.

Along one side of the lake is a line of bars. All of them had windows and doors open and live music blaring away. Most of it sounded like someone killing a cat to me so I wouldn’t of gone into them. 1 had a good singer, I never understood what she was saying but it sounded nice.

We found a quite spot by the lake to stop and have a beverage.

I people watched while we were sitting there.

Properly hydrated, we started making our way back to the subway to head to the tennis match.

We came out of the subway near the tennis centre and we finally saw the sun.

It was getting close to sunset time and that was as much colour I’ve seen for sunset here.

The tennis centre is a cool looking place.

We had decided to eat once we were at the tennis center and it was a bit slim for choices.

Still had some time to kill before the match so I had time to shoot some more stadium area.

 

Mercedes had a big booth as they appeared to be a major sponsor.

It was time to head into our seats.

I’ve never been to a tennis match so I was looking forward to seeing it live as all sports are better live.

We were excited to see Canadian Milos Raonic play. He was ranked 5th and we figured it would be fun to watch.

I’m sure what followed was the most boring match in the history of the world.

Raonic served first and each won his game but not easily. His opponent, Viktor Troicki won his game quite easily on his serve. This went back and forth till they were tied at 4 games each then Troicki broke for serve and went on to win the first set 6-4.

Exactly the same results in the 2nd set.

 

Troicki wins 6-4, 6-4. Raonic looked terrible.

 

 

There was still another match we could watch but if we wanted to catch the subway home we had to leave.

Boring ending to a pretty good day. Did 20,469 steps today.