The first day i walked by Tienanmen square. Totally covered with garbage. It's so wide that you can see the pollution fog in the air by the other side. Lots of people wandering around asking if you are finished with your PET bottle drink yet. They collect them for a living I guess. And each garbage can has a poor guy standing next to it, intercepting any bottles that might be thrown away.
When I see a Chinese person throw some garbage on the ground I get so mad. It'd your own country, what are you doing? It's a good thing my chinese isn't better.
The square is mostly a huge bunch of flat stone, but there's a little bit of grass on one side. All the blowing garbage accumulates there. I went back there about a week later and the place was clean.. and there was a huge cleaning truck blasting it with water and slurping up the garbage. Unfortunately there's no drainage on the square, so when it rains huge sections are covered with water.
In Chengde, a student friend of mine named Beacon took me to a temple. Not that special compared to japanese temples. One of them had a pretty cool huge statue of buddha. The other was done in tibetan style, so it looked a lot like that one in Lhasa. Both are pretty nice architecturally, but I am suspicious of how much is real and how much is just modern cast contrete.
An amazingly funny thing happened. This couple was Japanese, there with a tour group led by a flag bearing screeching woman. The man seemed senile.
This is the stool you bow down on with your incense, then you stand up and bow deeply with the burning sticks in your hands. There was a woman who was really intense about it, with 3 2 foot long burning incenst sticks in her hands, bowing deeply. The man didn't notice or just ignored her, and sat on this stoop right in front of her. The next time she came bowed, intensely with eyes closed, the incense hit his jacket and a bunch of burning incense fell on him. They both looked shocked, and brushed off the ashes. He went back to praying, and she stepped back and finished her bows. That's a mood breaker.
The whole idea that this is a real religion was a joke... they had attendants there teaching people how to bow. People selling all kinds of stuff inside. People taking pictures, yelling tour guides etc. I can't take it seriously
This is after he got burned. I couldn't tell if that woman was his wife or his daughter.
In front of the main temple, there are 8 musicians. If you give enough money, they play while you walk up and bow in the special spot.
It reminds me a lot of the jewish temples before jesus came along - people selling stuff, rich people buying bigger incense and praying ostentatiously, and paying more to get to more holy places to pray. Temple admission is like 5$, more than the average daily wage for most Chinese.
This was on the side of the tibetan dancing ... unfortunately they were dancing to normal Chinese pop.
I was really pissed off to see the speaker - but couldn't figure out how to justify it. But then I realized - if you're going to introduce modern things to traditional religions, why not introduce something like say... rationality? or occam's razor? or believability? If you keep everything as it was, ok I can sort of respect you, you're wrong but you're at least consistent.
This gate was really cool.
a tower. whatever. Wires sticking out the side there on the right. guys selling incense inside.
My friend beacon wanted to pray ... The girl behind him was telling him how to do it, how to sit, how many times to bow etc. After you buy incense you get to write one of your problems on a little slip of paper and put it in a box. What a load of garbage.
This is in the forbidden city in Beijing. This place was actually pretty cool. A huge amount of stone, incredibly hot. Tons of chinese foreigners who are back in china for "discovering your roots" summer camps.
Except for the garden, the place was really bare. The palace burned down a of times.
This is my friend beacon from the university. He's a 3rd year CS student, who speaks really good english too.
Anyway, so from reading this you must thing I hate China.
Actually, I love the place. There are a lot of good things about it. I like the people, the attitude, the relaxed layout of the city, and the food. It's really exciting, lots of new stuff starting. But I don't see a point in pretending to be impressed by their old stuff. I'll tell my students I loved it, and won't insult them, but that's all. I've seen way more impressive things in Europe and Japan, and at Angkor Wat. And once you've seen things like yellowstone, it's hard to be impressed by anything that's covered by a pollution haze, as everywhere I've been in China has been.
I'm not writing it off yet; I still haven't been to the art museums, or to the west. But in Beijing, the youth culture and bar streets are infinitely more interesting.
Auto-appended listing of files/folders this original page does not reference.
