May 15th, Six Banyan Tree Temple and More Guangzhou
We journeyed to the Six Banyan Tree temple in Guangzhou on our next full day in the city. It was quite a fascinating place! The Temple was built in 537 AD, and rebuild in 1097. Rumor has it that it was built without any nails!
It was also hot. Not just a bit sweaty hot, but traversing the surface of the sun hot.
Despite the heat, or perhaps because of it it was a bit of a mystical experience. The three Buddha you can see through the temple doors represent the past, the present and the future.
While we wandered around we noted an interesting mix of tourists, families adopting children and Buddhists going about their business, with a fair sprinkling of monks.
Bella spent a good deal of time sleeping through the heat.
Towards the end of our visit the CAWLI families were invited into one of the partitioned rooms and were given a special blessing by one of the monks. It was quite a ceremony!
After the temple, we all piled back into our bus and visited one of the porcelain shops. We purchased a beautiful multi-colored porcelain bowl and the folks at the shop packaged it up for us. Let it be a testament to them that it survived 34 hours of pure travel in carry on luggage and arrived safely back at our home, where it rests easy to this day.
After our day out, we decided to have a pizza party at the White Swan. Since it was our idea, our room became the place of pizza! We ordered a bunch of pies from Danny's Bagels and one travel mate even wandered down to the 7-11 to return with some gigantic bottles of beer. Pizza and beer! Heaven!
I should probably mention that there is an eating establishment not far from the White Swan called Lucy's. I would recommend to any travelers to stay away from it. Yes, they serve western food, however the meals were not well cooked, and several travel mates ended up with mild food poisoning, Ben included. It may be called mild food poisoning, but there's nothing mild about it to the one getting poisoned!
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