Last day in Beijing

Unfortunately again Neil woke up feeling pretty sick so on our last day in Beijing I headed out alone to the Lama Temple and the Confucian Temple. At first I was expecting the Lama Temple to be something different from what it turned out to be, and I was initially a little disappointed at it looked as though it had much of the same architecture as many of the other temple type places in the Forbidden Palace and Summer Temple for example. But just walking around the area outside the entrance to the temple was very interesting as there were stores selling Tibetan products, incense and other Buddhist offerings.

I went into the Lama Temple amidst a few tourist groups and went through the complex coming out pretty amazed. While the outer architecture is pretty typically Chinese, inside the series of temples was very Buddhist. There were huge statues of Buddhist deities with multiple hands and big scary eyes. There were some beautiful hanging cloth adorning the temples. And there was a small museum with a large collection of Buddhist deities describing who they were – along with a freaky life-like monk sitting on a 3 tiered alter type thing in the middle. Perhaps most interesting was that the Temple is still a place of worship for many of Beijing’s Buddhist and people were lighting incense and making prayers all throughout the courtyards and the temples. The temple buildings got larger and larger as I progressed through the complex until the last building - it housed an enormous gold gildered standing Buddha.




I had a great taxi ride back with a very jolly and vivacious (drunk perhaps??!) taxi driver to meet Dad and Neil for lunch again at Happy Duck. This time the place was absolutely packed with people, and again we ordered heaps and heaps of food. The same yummy fish as our first lunch, beef, fried rice, some fried potato/sweet potato dish and a delicious stirfried celery and lotus flower. Of course I had to stuff myself because it was so yummy and it was our last lunch in Beijing!!

Neil headed back to the apartment while dad and I went back down to the Ladies market where dad bought me my Christmas present – a jacket. We had a bit of a look around and then dad went back to work while I went back home to pack.

Later that evening after saying our sad goodbyes, we took a car down to the Beijing train station where we were totally confused as to where to take the train to Shanghai. Fortunately the sign pointing to the ‘tourist ticket office’ turned out to be the waiting room for the train and at 6.30 we boarded our ‘deluxe’ compartment for the overnight trip down to Beijing. After our initial excitement of our first overnight deluxe sleeping berth train ride, I suffered a little train sickness, dinner turned out to be a little dodgy, we found out that they didn’t sell any water on the train (they had beer though!) and Neil suffered a sleepless night that he shared with me on and off throughout the night. Arriving at 6.55 am wasn’t much fun either – I would have been happy if the train took a few hours longer so we could have arrived at 8 or 9 . . .

But eventually we ate a McDonalds breakfast and got in a taxi over to Jasmine and Mark’s house, where we promptly joined everyone else in sleeping in late.

The train from Beijing to Shanghai

posted by batik billy @ 1:54 pm