As the weather had been cold till yesterday we decided to go ice skating on one of the lakes of Beijing. It was strange to see that the one side of the lake was not completely frozen. But it was open for ice skating.
They started charging entrance tickets to get onto the frozen lake last year. But I found this year it is even more horrible as they had put up a fence around the whole lake and even at the section for the swimming. but it was nice to be outdoors in the sunshine.
As always there was hardly anybody ice skating. Unfortunately the few Chinese guys who could actually ice skate were not there. They might have been at home as it is Chinese New Year. But there is enough other things for the Chinese to play with on the ice. The most popular is the ice chairs with the screw drivers welded to poles:
This year there were also more ice bikes seen:
If you feel like an emperor you can also be pulled around the lake on a yellow cushioned sheep sleigh, even though we did not see anybody do that:
Maybe you need to be wearing the new hat fashion like these 2 Chinese guys to be able to sit on the sleigh:
This year they also started to close the lake at 4pm. We used to skate at night. When we were leaving we only left our skate rink circle behind:
