In Which We Visit Some Temples

So, China, day four. Pretty fun day. Our first endeavor was to try to find church, as it was Sunday. This proved to be more difficult than we thought. We had the address and map that the church website had, and we went there, and the only conclusion that really makes sense is that they must meet in someone's apartment, because there was definitely no sign around saying anything about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I mean, it's possible that the place on the website is out of date or something, but oh well. We decided that we tried and moved on. Our first stop of the day was the Lama Temple, a huge Buddhist temple in downtown Beijing. The big thing to do there is burn incense, and I'll tell you what, you could tell. We didn't take a lot of pictures there, because you weren't allowed to take pictures inside of the buildings, which was where all the cool Buddha images were. The finale of sorts was at the end where they had an 18 meter tall Buddha statue that was carved out of a sandalwood tree. It was gold plated, so you couldn't really tell, but it's one of the larger Buddhas in the world, and apparently the largest one carved from sandalwood (though that is pretty specific). Here are some pictures we took.

The entrance.

Another lion. This one has really big ears.

I'm not sure what this thing is, but people were throwing money at it.

Buddhist prayer wheel.

A building. There was a tree in the way.

I thought the bridge between the buildings was cool.

Smoke! Seriously, there was so much incense burning going on here!

After the Lama temple we went across the street to the Confucius Temple. There really wasn't a lot to see over there, but there were a couple exhibit halls that told us what Confucianism is, and that was pretty interesting. The temple itself wasn't that exciting. Here are some pictures anyway.

This is a statue that I can only assume is Confucius.

Another turtle-dragon! This one is holding a stele on his back. They make a big deal out of steles (big pillars with writing on them) over there, but I think they're pretty boring.

I'm definitely the most lively-looking one in this picture. Apparently the disciples of Confucius (which is who I assume these guys are) weren't a very fun bunch.

Nancy in the main courtyard.

Me with a bell.

After the Confucius Temple, we headed to what turned out to be one of my favorite sites in Beijing: The Summer Palace! This was apparently the place where the emperor and his family would go in the summer, hence the name. The place was pretty awesome. It was like the Forbidden City, only smaller, and there was a hill we could hike on, which I'm always a fan of. Here are a few pictures of that.

Main gate.

Nancy thought this boat was cool.

I thought this boat was cooler! Large portions of it are made completely from marble! The rest is wood that's painted to look like marble.

Nancy in the long corridor. They really could come up with a better name for it. But I suppose it is that. It's more than a kilometer long!

Every crossbeam in the long corridor is painted! Here's one. I took pictures of a couple others.

Cool view out across the lake.

View from higher up the hill.

This building is awesome!

The view of Beijing.

This looked really fun, but you had to pay a bunch just to get down there, not to mention renting the sleds, so we decided to just go.

After the summer palace we went to a night market for dinner. That would have been more fun if it wasn't so crowded, but it was still pretty cool. We got to try some different foods, like some kind of sprout burrito (it was okay but not awesome) and some dumplings that a guy tried to get us to pay 50 yuan (about eight dollars) for. We didn't go for that, thank you very much. We also had some lamb skewers and those suckers were AWESOME! I wish we had bought like 20 of them, but by the time we ate them I didn't want to have to dive back into the crowds to get more. It's like Tucano's on a stick if Tucano's had mutton. Seriously awesome. Plus they were selling four of them for less than two dollars. I could go for that. Anyway, that's about all I have to say about this day. Overall it was pretty cool. This is Captain Danger out.