I believe that Serano said it best in the movie "Major League" when paying homage to his little Buddha statue, "Lama Lama Lama Laaaaama". Yesterday, after spending a few hours at the hostel trying to restore the iPod (again thanks to Jon, Collin, RJ and Mike for your suggestions) I decided to venture out on the streets of Beijing. First stop, the Lama Temple. Being only 200 meters away from the hostel, I entered this amazing structure. The cost was only 25RMB ($3) and you can explore all the splendors of the this temple. Hundreds of people flock to this temple daily to pay respect to the various Buddha structures and ask for his blessing. Walking to the temple you know you are close because there vendors on the street selling incense and mala beads so one can leave as an offering at the temple. So when I entered all I can see is people lining up and paying homage to the structures in the temple. I decided to join in and went to the on of the buildings that held one of the largest Buddha statues and payed homage to it by bowing twice and the leaving 3 sticks of incense (unlit of course).
After a few hours I decided to grab the subway (line 5 to line 1) to Tiananmen Square. What an amazing site. I believe it's one of the largest town squares in the world. There were so many people walking around the square and taking photos infront of the Forbidden City, which lies behind the walls of Tiananmen. As I was walking around the Forbidden City, a local Beijingese girl approaches and askes me where Im from. I told her I was the US and instantly she wanted to practice her english. So after a few minutes she decided to show me around the hutong (local alleys) of Tiananmen. We ended up in a traditional tea house and spent the next 3 hours discussing things from politics, religion to family life. Beijing people are extremely friendly and welcoming and find us Americans interesting. Zhao Na and I walked through the various hutongs for another hour and she was explaining to me the life of a typical Beijing local.
Today, I met a couple from Brazil (Andre and Caroline) at breakfast and we decided to explore the city together. Our first stop was the Olympic park. There we visited the Birds View and the Water Cube, the home the Michael Phelps built...hahahaha. I would highly recommend spending a few hours in this part of Beijing. It's amazing what this country did to prepare for the Olympics. Afterwards we decided to head to Wangfujian which is known the "shopping distrcit." Here is where you find all the major stores from Chanel, Addidas, Nike, etc but you also find the bizzarre market in one of the alleys. We started following some of the crowds and wound up in the middle of frenzy. There were vendors selling some strange foods such as live scorpion (yes, people were eating them), grasshoppers, beetles, and some creature that looked like a minature bat. I was thinking about trying the grasshopper....yeah right!!! As we started to head back to the subway station, another local Beijingese girl approached me and asked where I was from. (I knew where this was heading.) All she wanted to do was practice her english so Andre, Caroline myself and our new friend, Tracie (she gave herself an American name) went to a local bar for some tea and beer. We spent a few hours just having fun and listening to some cool chinese pop music (wasn't toooooo bad).
Tomorrow, Im off to the do the Great Wall 10km hike from JinShanLing to Simatai.
2 comments:
Great update Weeg, it sounds like your experience was much better after that initial hiccup with the cab driver and the iPod (I'll see if I can work with Collin to add some more music to his ftp site for you). Isn't the internet age amazing? Halfway across the world in another continent and we can get pictures and updates on where you went and what you did on the exact same day. Pretty cool to hear how interested the Chinese are with Americans, you should practice your Chinese with them as well! I cannot wait to see pictures of the mountains and more updates from your trip. Stay safe.
Great job capturing your first impression of China to all of us. Yes, practice your Chinese.
Do some Karoke for us.
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