Lama Temple

Today was another optional tour day that we chose to do. We took the subway to the Lama Temple area. Our first stop was the Imperial College and Confucius Temple. This was an interesting place where 300 students every 3 years were selected to study and take exams. Only the best would be chosen to work for the Emperor.

From there we walked to the Lama Temple. The Lama Temple is a Buddhist Temple. Forest explained what the different Buddha statues meant. Many Buddhists comes here to pray and burning incense in the air was heavy. There were two temples before the main temple. In one of the temples there was a large piece of sand art made by the Lama monks. It was amazing the amount of detail that went into it with just colored grains of sand. The main temple contained a 3-story high Buddha made out of a tree. It was over 200 years old and an impressive site. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures.

We took the subway back, and said our good-byes to Forest. He was an excellent tour guide and we are sad that he is not going with us to the other cities. We stopped at a bakery that smelled amazing and picked up some croissants that had ham, cheese, and corn baked in them. We thought might need them for a breakfast since we were going to be leaving early to the airport.

We went with Jeff and Molly to a restaurant that was located across the street from our hotel for lunch. We ordered a couple of dishes (there were pictures and English translations), but were disappointed when they arrived and found that they both contained bones mixed in. The flavor was good, it was just a pain to eat around the bones. Unfortunately not a favorite lunch for us.

After dropping Tom and our stuff back at the hotel, Leah and I went back to the New World Department Store so that we could browse the store and take more time in the grocery store. The department store was huge. The way the escalators went between the 6 floors reminded me of the game Chutes and Ladders. If you were looking to buy a pair of shoes for an outfit, I think this would be the place to come. There were shoes, upon shoes, upon shoes to choose from. Neither one of us were in any real mood to shop or browse, but we did just want to walk around. I told Leah that you know how sometimes when you are in the mall and you hear some ladies talking in a foreign language, that I realized that we were those ladies.

By the time we got done roaming the 5 floors of the department store, we were pretty tired but we still went down to the grocery store to buy some snacks for our upcoming travels. Again we were impressed with the array of flavor choices. I picked up some Finger Licking Braised Pork potato chips and lemon Oreos. We got back to the hotel at 6:20 and opted not to go to dinner, knowing that we were facing a 3:30 wake up for a 4:30 breakfast. Tom and I ate our ham/cheese croissants and snacks, since we had discovered that breakfast was going to be provided the next morning. I think we hit the sack at 9:30p.m.