Yunghe Lamasery (Lama Temple)

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Scott and I got a late start again, due to my morning snooze. I am having had a hard time sleeping....it is as if my internal clock is off. I am wide awake at 2 and do not get sleepy until 5. I annoy Scott by getting up and searching the
internet.
Before I go about with our day I had a good/ bad person dilemma this morning in the elevator. A couple of French men were in the elevator as we got on. I noticed the man's zipper was down and he had no underwear on. As I struggled with my shock and how I would be able to tell him the door opened and we were in the lobby. I chose to get out and giggle as we walked away. I AM a bad person. Scott did not notice so he is innocent.
We grabbed breakfast/lunch at the bakery next door. It is hard to resist with the fresh bread smell. We decided to try the subway system today. It is cheap (35 cents each) and clean, but a LOT crowded. At least the Chinese believe in air-conditioning. We get a lot of stares from the locals....maybe foreigners typically do not use the metro?? The nice thing about the metro is that there are no street vendors pushing tourist junk in your face every other minute. We have decided that at least in Europe we could blend a bit, here there is no way :-). I have taken to being a bit rude. I pretend like I do not hear them or do not understand English.
We took the metro up to the North side of the embassy section; we headed that direction for two reasons: 1. Visa/passport services and 2. The Lama Temple. We got direction to visa services from the Concierge but he was off a bit, since he directed us to take a left out of the metro and we should have taken a right. So we headed off to option 2.
The Lama Temple was built in 1694 as the residence for Qing dynasty Prince Yung; it became a lamasery in 1744. The main attraction of the temple is the 18 meter high Buddha; unfortunately you are unable to actually see all of it. The Buddha is made mostly out of one piece of sandalwood. There are over 20 buildings each with alters to different Buddha, each of the Buddha are decorated in gold, silver and precious stones.
You will notice by the lack of good photos or a photo at all of the Buddha that photos were not allowed in buildings. I tried to take some with the zoom lens form the courtyards, but not with much luck.
It was a little odd touring through the temple as people were doing prayers and burning incense for Buddha. I felt like I was interrupting church. Even though one worshipper was going overboard.....had blanket out and was doing full body prayers (it looked like yoga or the break dancing worm). She continued this the whole time we were there.

When we were leaving we encountered a tourist that was carrying a guidebook in English, so I asked him if I could look at it. We located the visa/passport office and off we went. We had decided to see if we could apply for another Chinese visa before we left Beijing. The reason being that we would like to have multiple entries, so that we could travel to Japan and return to China, then go to Taiwan and return to China. Upon arrival they informed us that our best option was to apply while in Japan. We decided that we would just enter those two countries from Hong Kong and forego the need for a visa.

We caught the metro back to the main Train Station and looked for the CITS office, which we were going to use to make a reservation for us in Datong. We couldn’t locate it so we bought some necessities for our hike tomorrow and headed back to the hotel.

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Comments

[Cynda]

Time
Hi.Love the pictures!!!! How long do plan to stay in China? I hope you are taking lots of notes for your book!!!! Take care of each other. cynda