Blogs from Putuoshan, Zhejiang, China, Asia

I'm falling behind on these, clearly, but I only have a couple days left before we go into the full thick of it with shows, so I am going to make a push to try to catch up. Forgive me if things aren't as detailed as you'd like. I already feel like I am writing a ton. Also, even when I'm connected to ethernet, the internet here is painfully slow... adding a single photograph to this blog takes around 10 minutes... for that reason I probably won't be adding as many in the future. Anything I talk about is definitely on the flickr page, so I encourage you to go there and take a look... Anyway, so Putuoshan - after visiting the big, new temple, we took the cable car up to the top of the ... read more

A break! Masumi, Datri and I took advantage of the break from shows and ran for it... after several thoughts about places to go, we decided on Mount Putuo, or Putuoshan, an island in the East China Sea a bit south of Shanghai. It's small, and used to be remote, but now is pretty easily accessible from the mainland thanks to a series of very long bridges connecting several islands. Thus it was that we took a four hour bus ride, then a twenty minute ferry to one of the most holy sites in the Buddhist religion. The island itself is essentially a mountain surrounded by narrow roads with temples in every corner. We chose a pretty new and nice hotel, and the room was sweet, roomy, and slightly expensive, but split between three people the ... read more

We reluctantly got out of the comfy bed around 7am, took hot showers and headed downstairs to the breakfast room. It was a typical Chinese breakfast buffet- fried rice, lots of meat and random Chinese pickled vegetables, toast, random baked goods, watermelon, hot juice that tasted like Tang and probably was and of course rice porridge. We ate until we were full and then headed outside with everyone else to the bus. As we waited for the few stragglers, a few teachers started playing their version of hackey-sack (they kick around an object with feathers on it) and Martin joined in, getting lots of laughs and "very good!" comments from everyone. It was cute. We found out that we were actually in the city of Ningbo and were on our way to yet another high school. ... read more

This morning I returned to Shanghai after a wonderful weekend at Putuoshan (Mt. Putuo) one of the four Buddhist mountain pilgrimage sites in China. Mt. Putuo is a small island to the South-east of Shanghai, near the port city of Ningbo. Most visitors to Putuoshan are Chinese Buddhists making their pilgrimage to the island's temples. On Friday afternoon, Ruikai, Hunter, YaoYao, Nancy, Joyce and I took the overnight passenger ferry from Shanghai to the island. Nancy and Joyce actually ended up missing our boat, but were able to get on the next boat, an hour behind us. We had left our roommates in charge of planning our transportation and buying the tickets, and they decided to go with 4th class (out of 4) tickets, so our bunks were on the very lowest level of the boat, ... read more

Putuo Shan ist eine Insel unweit Shanghais. Übersetzt heißt es etwa Berg Potala, wobei Potala der Wohnsitz von Avalokiteshvara - Schutzpatron Tibets - ist. Von den vielen (wohl über 20) Klöstern der Insel haben wir 5 besucht. Da ich mich aber nicht mehr an alle Namen erinnern kann, habe ich sie nummeriert, der Reihenfolge des Besuchs nach. Kloster I ist gefolgt von Kloster IV das touristischste, wobei Kloster V wohl das wichtigste ist, da es oben auf dem (heiligen und höchsten) Berg der Insel liegt. Die Bilder sprechen sicher für sich.... read more