Continued Exploration (sorry, this one is super delayed)

Hi again--

It's been a sort of slow week for posts, mostly because of business getting classes (and internships! possibly) straight combined with my somewhat limited internet schedule. So I've got a couple of posts that I wrote in Word earlier this week to upload now. In this case, "today" means Wednesday, September 10.


-----------

More exploring.

This afternoon, since I didn’t have classes or anything, I went on a new explore. This one involved an old Taoist temple on the edge of town, and it was exciting because it involved not one but TWO buses, as well as asking my host mother for directions. Pretty intense stuff. But it all went smoothly, which was a big confidence booster. And I got to ride on a double-decker bus all the way across town and back, which was lots of fun. I’m impressed that this is a pretty big city.

The entrance to Golden Temple Park

The Golden Temple is on top of a mountain in a giant park. It’s called “Golden” because the whole thing is made out of bronze. But that’s ahead of the story. There’s a big entrance gate at the bottom of the hill, and after paying admission you enter the park, suddenly surrounded by forest. Very tranquil, which is something that I’m learning to value a lot here. But you can’t spend too long enjoying it, because the temple is at the very top of the mountain, up several hundred really steep steps connected by equally steep paths. When you finally make it, you step into the threshold through the Third Heaven Gate (got the hanzi for that one by myself :-), and are greeted by… ice cream merchants!! Very, very well placed, but not really what I expected. Still, I definitely bought one and set about seeing the temple.

Lots of pathways..

It’s really more of a complex than one single building. There is the bronze temple itself, which is about 20ft on a side and has a lot of really beautiful statues etc. within, but branching out from all sides are other, subsidiary temples, gardens, museums, and lots of big, old walls. Probably my favorite part was the bell tower, a little further up the hill:

This was by far the biggest building, and the only one that stuck up above the trees to give a view of the city. That was amazing—you could really see all the big buildings spreading out over a huge area, bounded by green mountains on all sides:


This is a pretty place. Doubly so from there, where the view was bordered by Taoist architecture and pine trees:


Also in the tower there were two bells (!). The main one is no longer active, though it’s gigantic—supposedly 5 meters around, which looked about right—but the smaller one (still huge: think Liberty Bell) was a Bell of Happiness, which you could ring using a fish-shaped clapper for two yuan. I did. You could get three rings for 5, though, which is what a lot of other tourists did (after I started the trend), so I hope I wasn’t missing something and one hit will be enough.

After walking around and getting my nature quota at least partially filled, I headed back down to the two buses and the city. Good day.