01 Mar 2020
Sunflower Li provided an excellent full day tour for my husband and myself. Sunflower speaks excellent English, and is very knowledgable. She's also very intuitive about her client's needs, adjusting the pace of the tour to the client's energy level. She noticed that my husband needed a little extra time to get into the back seat of a taxi, so to prevent the taxi driver from driving before my husband was settled, she kept her front door open until he was seated and his door was closed. All this without saying anything that would have made my husband feel he was being too slow.
I'm a vegetarian, and she took us to a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant for lunch. We were seated at a table with a couple from Harbin who hadn't seen Westerners. We had an interesting conversation with them, with Sunflower translating, and it was a highlight of our trip to meet "regular" Chinese people.
Sunflower made the touring very easy. She met us at our hotel. We first visited the Temple of Heaven. The park in which it's located is huge, and there were different activities going on, including several groups of people exercising, a band playing patriotic songs, another group of people dancing to swing music (which my husband and I joined in on!). Sunflower gave us lots of information about peoples' everyday lives. Then we went inside the Temple of Heaven, where she gave us a lot of historical and ritual information. Lunch at the Buddhist restaurant, then the Lama Temple, where again she gave us information about the temple and the religious practices.
All in all, we felt very taken care of by Sunflower, and really recommend this tour.