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Published: September 23rd 2011
For me, there is much which is magical about the sea. So far, my love of the ocean has only included the stretches of the Pacific on British Columbia and California's coastlines--Long Beach, BC is one of my favourite places and Malibu, CA is hard to beat. And as lovely as both of those are, however, Hawaii will always be my most beautiful Pacific destination......and with which I was completely captivated this past June. So maybe my love affair is not with oceans in general, but rather the Pacific, to be specific! LOL What a tongue-twister! The good news is that I have a lot of oceanic exploring LEFT in my world and something to look forward to! Anybody else IN for this adventure of exploring oceans with me?
So you know, I am recreating this part for the third time. If I lose it again, I am just going to give up...oh and that scream you hear? Yeah, that's me! That's my scream being heard ALL the way around the world from China. All the TravelBLog people might have to go into hiding or the Witness Protection Programme if I don't get some satisfaction in really short order here.
The 3 amigas, Dawna, Joyce and I left our apartment and headed east to catch a number 5 bus. Jim had warned us that we would ride it for 45 minutes to the "end of the line". What a strange bus ride! Big wide main thoroughfares, itty, bitty impossible side-streets. The bus actually turned around twice, the three of us looking hard at each other with that, wth? expression...but we did make it there and Jim met us at the end of the line. Whew. Not really knowing where you're going is sort of nerve wracking at times here.
Despite having been here almost a month, until I came to this side of Xiamen, I had yet to see a single temple. Minutes after arriving at the beach yesterday I had stumbled upon one, and then on our way to Alan and Jim's apartment yesterday, we visited a second. Buddhist temples, by the way. They are ornate and complicated.....colourful and highly decorative and even with so much going on visually or should I write DESPITE presenting so much visual stimulas, they still seem serene to me, somehow. I was fascinated by where my eyes wandered and how they
never seemed to stop looking or get enough of the scene! I could have easily sat by myself for a long, long time in either of them, but since we were bound for destinations in either case, it was not to be. I do wish, though, to come again on my own and be by myself at the beach, to sit and just be, to dip my feet into the South China Sea, so I can say I have done it, and then to visit with the spirits of the Buddhist sages who came before and who dwell yet in those temples. Another time. SAnother time.
After the temple at the beach, the sand sculptures lying on the northern tip of the beach are an unexpected treat and sit beside the amusement park--There must have been a bit of concrete in those sand sculptures "helping" them be so precise and sharply angular cuz I know how hard it is to make sandcastles at the beach and this sand was WAY crisper. How very clever! LOL There are quite a few to look at, and we didn't investigate them a whole lot, just sort of checked them out from the
upper part of the boardwalk, eager instead, to continue south and explore the sights and the sea.
Half-way down to the end of the boardwalk, I was stopped by a man and a teenaged boy who wanted to take my picture. The much-taller (who isn't? LOL) pimply-faced teenager stood beside me, put his arm around me and we both smiled for the camera. I am going to be in some family photos as the strange white lady on the beach! LOL That's kinda funny I guess, eh?
On the boardwalk I heard singing then spied a group of 3 young women happily engaged in song! Their melody being the golden lyrics carved in gilt lettering on the stone wall in front of them on the boardwalk. Obviously special to these pretty, lively young Chinese ladies, but in what way, I cannot say. Pity. Adjacent to the boardwalk is a sizeable musical phrase displayed as mural art and which sits adjacent to marble steps where a lone man sat bravely beside a band of black sculptural steel horses galloping wildly and silently alongside him! LoL. A gorgeous piece of art facing the sea--What a perfect location for it! I
don't know about you but I have done some of my best comtemplative work on windy, sandy, locales staring towards watery horizons. It seems to me that the beach is so obviously a terrific place for art. Perfect for unhurried inspection. And absolutley no pressure or obligation to examine it. Brilliant, I say! Sneaky! I love it!
The beach was completely deserted sauf a grandmother and her grandbaby son. Grandmother said some words at me which completely eluded me, smiling widely at me her toothy, sweet smile, THEN thrusting her small digital camera into my hands. Ah, she had asked me to take their picture together, which I was happy to do! She played with her cute little grandson, their pails and shovels and plastic beach toys the way any Canadian Grandmother and her grandbaby would and it made my heart swollen to consider again how alike we humans are at the beach--whether that beach is at Clearwater Lake, in The Pas, Manitoba, or Xiamen, Fujian, People's Republic of China.
Off the boardwalk, our feet sank into the soft sand. Sharp shells surprised our poor unsuspecting feet! 😞 (Oooooooooo get me and my amazing consonance in those last
2 sentences, LOL, go English teacher GO!) The closer we got to the water the more debris we saw mixed in with the sand. Piles of garbage which HAD to have been culled from the beach wore red tarpaulins as hats. Very near the shore, with the tide out, were fishing boats moored and an ominous looking very large pipe. Sewage pipe? Naw, didn't smell bad. Drainage pipe? Perhaps. We will likely never know. The large pipe didn't make the prospect of putting any body parts into the water appealing and it seem both smarter AND safer to just put that idea off for now and find a nicer place later on. Further down. MUCH further down. LOL
We ended our visit in Alan and Jim's apartment, a nice 2 bedroom, 6 floors up--no elevator--Yikes! They made us coffee and fed us snacks. The strange thing about their apartment was the bathroom. There is no separate shower. You shower in the bathroom beside the toilet and the sink and the whole thing is tiled, including the walls. The floor is sloped towards a tiny drain in the floor and you use a large squeegee to push all the water
from your shower down the drain. Ok. I'm not so sure I like that idea, but whatever! It's not MY apartment! LOL
I have uploaded another 100 photos. Some, it seems, are duplicates. I do apologize. I have had quite a bit of trouble again trying to get things done the way I'd like and it's just not happening, so I am surrendering to this moment, trusting that all is as it should be, even though it seems a bit chaotic to me and certainly for me, frustrating!!! A metaphor for life. So, enjoy them all, skip the duplicates, be my virtual partner in the voyage and let me add that you are a most welcome as a tag-along!
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Doug
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Time In The Temples
The temples look beautiful. I would love to spend a day or two hanging out at a temple like that and watch the routine of what goes on! Keep the pictures coming!