Lama Temple

Awesome flowers.

Seriously, awesome flowers.

The bottle I am holding contains some kind of tea which tastes a little like soap. yum.

Thats incense, not smoke. FYI.

My awesome uniform.

My friend, Nick. we were trying to figure out what this says. we have no clue, but we tried.

I am pretty sure I was not supposed to take pictures of this, but it was really cool. the pictures don't do it justice.

Again, the flowers are awesome.

So, today was a boring old wednesday in Beijing. We have half days on wednesday. I don't really know why, but I was certainly going to make the best of it. Today started off rainy, and continued to be so, but that didn't really stop me. went to school, had Chinese classes, the usual. This afternoon we were supposed to go to the Lama Temple and Confucius Temple as a school, but the trip was cancelled because it was raining. My friend Nick and I decided to go search for some bubble tea after lunch. I just learned the Chinese name for bubble tea, 珍珠奶茶（zhen shu nai cha） today in class, so I wanted to know if I could actually order it. we wandered into a few tea stores, but none of them had it. Finally, Nick had the sense to ask where we could get it. We got an answer which we didn't really understand, but went in the direction we were pointed in. Eventually, we came across a Hu Tong, a kind of alley, which looked promising. We had managed to wander down an absolutely sweet Hu Tong. We found our bubble tea, ordered it, and even received what we thought we ordered. we were pretty proud of ourselves. the Hu Tong was lined with street venders and cool fruit stands. it was so cool to walk down, but we had to be back at school. then, the school cancelled the trip, so we had the whole afternoon off. so, we decided to go to the temple on our own. this is harder than it sounds. we could have just taken a taxi, but thats no fun, so we decided we would learn to use the subway system. the teacher we asked seemed skeptical, and gave us the "oh, no, they are going to get lost and call me" look. well, we didn't. We even managed to get to the Lama temple, and not somewhere completely different. Here is a good place to note that our uniforms are sweet, although we get strange looks everywhere we go. foreigners wearing Chinese school uniforms is not really common. so we managed to get into the temple, and it was sweet. Everyone was burning incense. It is really interesting because the people here have no religion, but they still follow the old traditions of burning incense etc. it was really cool to watch and smelled pretty cool too. The old temples were really cool and had a lot of statues that were so huge it was hard to imagine building them, let alone what they were made of. We wandered around and found a temple filled with chanting monks. so cool. the electric desk lamps were pretty amusing, though. No pictures allowed, unfortunately. So by this point, we were feeling pretty confident and instead of going home, we decided to go to a park across the street. This park was so cool. Absolutely huge. filled with trees and beautiful landscaping. we even found a crochet course, which was unexpected. the english translation was ball drop court, most of the english translations are this good here. so we wandered for awhile to see what we could see. A lot of people practicing a tai qi type martial art in the grass and an really cool outdoor gym. yes, an outdoor gym complete with these cool elypticals (no clue how to spell that) and weight machines. i should note that the admittance fee to this park was 1 yuan, or about 20 cents. so eventually we found our way out, it took awhile after we got a little lost. we came across a cat reminicient of Elvis in size watching some birds. I don't think he could move fast enough to catch one, but Elvis has surprised me before. So anyway, we found our way back to the subway and got home without becoming completely lost. a pretty successful day, all in all. much more fun than school and homework.
so other than an awesome day at the Lama temple, this week had been going all right. Plenty of Chinese homework to keep me busy. Getting a little homesick. Can't drink the milk here, not that that is much of a loss, believe me. next week is a national holiday, so I don't have school. Hopefully I don't get too much homework. yeah, right. anyway, I miss you all.
Stephanie