This morning we were lucky and got to sleep in until 10am! We just had sightseeing today and no class which was a great way to spend this final day in Beijing. First we went to the Lama Temple which is a compound for a certain branch of Buddhism. Half of it is open to the public and the other half is for the monks to train from the master Lama monks. We walked around the temple and there are several buildings you can walk into with different Buddha statues and they each mean a different thing. For example, you can pray for long life to a certain Buddha and another one helps cure sickness. There were tons of Chinese people around with sticks of incense to pray to all of the Buddhas. You can’t burn incense or take photos inside the buildings because they believe that the picture takes the Buddha spirit out of the temple. So outside all of the buildings there were kneeling places and cauldrons of fire to light incense and lots of Chinese people bowing and waving the incense. Then inside there were also kneeling places with people bowing but no incense. The highlight of this temple is that it has the world record for the largest sculpture carved from a single tree. They brought a tree from Tibet that is 8 meters in diameter and put it in the ground here. I think there is another 8 meters of the tree underground before they started carving. So the overall statue that is carved out is at 18 meters tall Buddha statue that is just HUGE. It is so hard to describe and it is enclosed in a tower so you can’t see it from far away you just have to stare up in order to see the head. All of the Buddhas are decorated with colorful clothes and have lots of fruit and things around that look like offerings. We were touring this place with a guide explaining everything all while these Chinese people are praying so it felt a little weird but I assume they are used to it.
After that we took the bus to lunch which was in a really nice pedestrian mall. We were having traditional hot pot cuisine, which basically means I went to the Chinese version of Melting Pot (aka: it was awesome). We had the usual round table but in the middle this time was a pot of boiling water – I think it had a few veggies in it already for flavor but I didn’t taste much. The tables already had plates of veggies and you could hold them in the hot pot so they cooked and became soft and delicious. My favorite was the sweet potato. Then they brought out the meat and it was plates and plates of thinly sliced meat (I think it was lamb?) that looked like cold cuts, but we clearly had to cook it. So then we could hold the slices into the hot pot and they cook really quickly – much faster than Melting Pot, but also you have to hold it in there with your chopsticks which was definitely challenging. (Yeah did I mention that I have to eat like every meal with chopsticks? I’m becoming an expert I think) Our table got sick of holding everything in the pot one by one though so we ended up putting almost all of the meat and veggies in there to cook and we would just take out stuff when we wanted. And then since we emptied the plates they kept bringing us more food to cook which was awesome. Everything was really tasty and a good change from having all the usual dishes with everything covered in oily sauces. After lunch we had a little free time to walk around the pedestrian mall which had several American brand stores and was definitely more upscale than any place we had been yet.
Our afternoon activity was touring an area of Beijing called a Hutong which is sort of an alley that you will find yourself in if you turn off a certain street. It is original housing from the 12th century and the government requires it to stay exactly the same on the outside to preserve the history. Everything was just gray brick and there was a lot of construction around to redo the bricks. We walked from our bus to the starting point and then we had rickshaws that took us through the narrow alleys. We rode in the rickshaws for a little bit – everything was just really dusty from the construction and you couldn’t really see that much. At the end of the ride we ended in the Hou Hai district which is a bunch of bars lining a man-made river running through it. The bars weren’t really hoppin’ yet because it was like 2 in the afternoon but they were all open air and you could see in that the decorations were so strange! Everything was brightly colored or wildly printed couches and glittery walls…very strange. We did happen upon one bar that looked awesome because it was the Michael Jackson bar! It plays only MJ tunes and as you can see has some great décor as well.
After we walked around this area for 15 min we got back in our rickshaws and rode around a little more until the end of the ‘tour.’ At this point it was too early to go to dinner so we walked to the farmers market. It was huge and had tons of crazy fruits that you never see in normal US grocery stores. I obviously didn’t try anything but it was cool to see all of it. Then we walked back to our dinner spot which was a really great experience – we went into one of the Hutong homes and had a traditional home-cooked meal of Beijing food. First, the wife told us a little about the family and then let us look around the house. The house consisted of a room for the parents, room for the son, kitchen, and bathroom. All the rooms were separated by a tiny outdoor courtyard. It’s hard to explain but it was all very small. The kitchen definitely only had room for one person to stand in it. They were so proud of having this house and it was apparently a big deal for them even though it seemed so small to us so it was interesting to hear their story. Then we sat down for dinner and we were all packed into the parents’ room at round tables with tiny metal stools to sit on. We had tiny plates and tiny chopsticks and I felt like I was visiting a little person’s house! The food was really good though! We had sweet potato chips, rice, chicken, some sort of pork meatball dish, dumplings, broccoli, and a few other dishes. I really liked everything, probably because it was supposed to be “normal” food and not trying to be fancy or anything like that.
After our delicious dinner we headed back to the bus which brought us to the hotel. It was a great last day in Beijing and I really liked all the sightseeing that we got to do instead of having class (of course, haha). I can’t believe we are already leaving Beijing tomorrow and there are so many things I still didn’t get to see! I’m not sure if I will ever be back here but I have definitely been able to get more comfortable with the city over the past 7 days. This was our longest stop of the journey so I think the rest of this experience might just fly by. Time to pack and get to bed early for our departure flight in the morning.
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