Lama Temple

This morning, I had my first oral quiz in Chinese class. I went first, and I was alone in the classroom with my teacher who asked me some questions in Chinese and I answered them in Chinese. It was not as bad as I was expecting, I felt prepared, and I know enough Chinese to be able to understand and speak for those few minutes, which is really cool.

The lunch meeting was jam-packed with information today. We have an excursion tomorrow and the bus leaves at 8AM sharp. There was no Public Health class today. Most importantly, the travel agent came to collect our money for the trip to Hongzhou, and there was some information about that. Be prepared for an extremely long blog post after that trip because I will not have internet access during that long weekend. I will be keeping a handwritten journal that I can transfer here, but since it will cover five days, it will be a very long and hopefully interesting post.

Since we had the afternoon off, I went with Marissa, Caleb, Maitreyi, and Pooja to the Lama Temple. Lama as in Dalai. It was kind of like the Forbidden City in architecture and layout, but the content was entirely Tibetan Buddhist. There were a lot of people going to worship there because the Maitreyia Buddha at the Lama Temple is the largest Buddha carved out of a single piece of wood. It is 18 meters above ground and 8 meters below, which boils down to it being simply enormous. All of the courtyards, buildings, and statues were absolutely beautiful, and it was a really great way to spend the afternoon.

The subway stop we got off from literally runs underneath the temple, so we had to walk the perimeter to get to the entrance. On our way, we noticed the hutongs (old neighborhoods of small, interconnected buildings) and shops selling Buddha statues, sandalwood, incense, and other such trinkets. It was really fun to browse on our way back, and some people bought statues and incense. We ended the excursion with ice cream, and it made for a truly wonderful afternoon.

I had dinner in a cafeteria I had never been to before, and I enjoyed my chicken, eggplant, green beans, and rice very much. I ended my evening with some nice relaxing before going to bed on the early side. I've been failing to do that all week because I've been so busy, but it's going to happen tonight!!

Today is awesome because I went to the Lama Temple, had a great time, and got to check it off my tourist list!