View allAll Photos Tagged refreshing
“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”
An oldie edited today. Looks like my planned shoot tomorrow is now off again because of this friggin weather.
...Took my 50mm out into the garden not for long as it was raining and captured this flower head.
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© Adam Taylor Photography 2010
refreshing lemonade - Water in glass with slices of lemon in and around the glass.. To Download this image without watermarks for Free, visit: www.sourcepics.com/free-stock-photography/24731896-refres...
I finally found one of those neat, wide-mouthed, clamping jars to keep it in. A mix of white, wheat and rye. Pretty lively and it smells wonderful. More bread-making today, I think.
A refreshing drink in the afternoon on this hot hot day. Actually it is Crystal Light in a wine glass. But I do have a glass of wine to back this one up.
A hot August day in 2019 gave me the chance to wander around downtown Indianapolis and take in the sights. I can remember this water looking so refreshing as the sun baked the streets.
The Beijing Working People’s Cultural Palace is a refreshing place to visit if you want to get away from tourists (or any of the other ~20 million people in Beijing). Ironically, this compound is located in the heart of downtown Beijing. It’s actually part of the Forbidden City – historically – but now, like Zhongshan Park, it’s a separate entity. For that reason, it tends to be overlooked.
I suppose, to give a clear idea of what we’re talking about, I’ll mentally lay out the Forbidden City & Tiananmen Square for you from a birds’ eye view. Tiananmen is (at least according to what I read here in China) “the largest public square in the world.” Imagine a somewhat stout rectangle standing on end. On the bottom (south) end would be Qianmen, one of the old gates to the city, and Chairman Mao’s Mausoleum. On the left (west) is the Hall of the People, which is where Chinese government convenes, etc. On the right (east) side is the National Museum. Finally, along the top (north) is the Forbidden City, across Changan Avenue (one of the widest avenues in the world).
Crossing over to the palace via the Changan underpasses, most people head straight for the Forbidden City, which is easy to find (just follow Mao’s head). A quick overview of the palace would show a rather long rectangle on end (feels like it’s about 2 km on the north-south axis and about 1 km on the east-west, but those are guesses). If you were to look at it from above, the palace grounds actually only take up about the top 2/3 of the area in question.
The other 1/3 of the area is usually overlooked by people. When you walk into the main gate at the south end of the complex, you pass through something of a medium-sized “bottleneck,” with no signage indicating what’s in the areas that you don’t see. That’s where the Workers’ Cultural Palace (and Zhongshan Park, actually) are located. In the southeast quadrant (and the entrance is actually facing Changan Avenue, but is completely nondescript otherwise), you find the entrance to this park.
At 200,000 square meters, it’s no small park by any stretch of the imagination. (Zhongshan Park, in the opposite – southwest – corner is roughly equal in size.) For a cost of 10 元 (a shade over $1.50 as of this writing), you can have practically free reign in this park.
The park is quite pleasant. Historically, it was the Imperial Ancestral Temple (Tai Miao) completed in 1420 along with the rest of the Forbidden City. Emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties made sacrifices (usually burning silk) to their ancestors here. In accordance with Chinese beliefs, the ancestors were on the left (of the main imperial throne inside the Forbidden City) and the “state” (Altar of the Soil and Grain) was on the right – where Zhongshan Park is now located.
Of the 200,000 square meters in the park, the actual temple takes up 140,000 meters and is almost concentrically located in the middle. The temple is separated from the park by three red/ochre walls. Between the temple walls and the outer park walls, there is quite a pleasant forest of old-growth cypress and pine trees. Many of the trees are a few hundred years old.
Inside, the temple is laid out symmetrically. Along the central axis, there is a glazed gate, a white marble bridge (7, actually; the center one for the emperor and the 3 on either side for “lesser” members of the royal delegation: the farther from the center, the less important to the delegation you were), a halberd gate, and three great halls. Flanking this configuration, there are well pavilions, a spirit kitchen, a spirit storehouse, and side halls.
The front hall is where the emperor performed sacrificial rites. It had a three-tiered base made of white marble. It’s 32.46 meters tall, 68.2 meters long, and 30.2 meters deep. The floor of the temple is made of “gold brick” and the temple is built using cedar pillars. It was built two meters higher than the Imperial Palace’s Hall of Supreme Harmony to show its importance.
The other two halls house the spirit tablets of deceased emperors and empresses (in the central hall) and more distant ancestors (in the rear hall). Those halls are called, respectively, the Hall of Repose and Hall of Remote Ancestors.
Upon the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the Imperial Palace was gradually opened to the general public (in May 1950) with a name that was suggested by Zhou En-Lai.