Our second day in Chengdu started with a visit to a old taoist temple where we had a brief overview of Taoism and met with a monk to chat about his life and to see his dormitory on the temple grounds.
He was pretty nice although I am not sure everything he said was being well-translated for us. He had a nice room with a computer, mobile phone and lots of other modern appliances. He did a short tea ceremony for us with both oolong and green tea, and another monk came by and gave us a short tai-chi demonstration. He and Anders then decided to try and see who could unbalance the other first. The kids thought that was hilarious.
We also did a fortune telling ritual with shaking the sticks out of the container, one of my favorite pursuits from a child when I visited any temple. Then our monk interpreted the fortunes which were printed on a piece of paper that matched the number of the first stick that fell out when you were shaking.
I still remember our trip to Taiwan when I was a child where we learned that although I would have "middling fortune", my sister would have "supreme fortune"! Our fortunes on this trip were nowhere near as specific or amusing!
And so, we said goodbye to Chengdu and took an hour long
China Southern Airline flight (in a nice new Airbus A330) up to Xian for the next stage of our trip.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment