Day 18 Church and the Buddhist Temple

This morning I woke to loud knocking on my door. I tried to ignore it, but the person would not stop knocking, so I got out of bed (looking like death, I might add) and cracked the door open only to see some confused little Chinese man dart across the hall to the next door down. 6:15 on a Sunday morning is not a good time to make a room number mistake. Since traffic is as bad as ever at 6:15 and the honkers were out with a vengeance, I was unable to get back to sleep.

Anyway, a few hours later I left for the Shanghai branch to go to church. It was raining pretty hard and someone was a little too eager to leave all rain gear behind in Seattle, so the walks between buildings and metro stations were a little painful, but oh so worth it. I didn’t get to go to church last week because I was in Beijing with the HCF group, and I was so excited to go this morning. Even though I don’t know many people in the branch, it’s still really fun to be with friendly, English-speaking, LDS people. We had two great talks today, too, and the other lessons were good too. It was mostly just wonderful to be there.

Meanwhile, James and Evan were eating Dim Sum with Fred, the awesome badminton-playing coworker, so I told them I’d meet up with them in the afternoon since Fred wanted to show us some things in Shanghai. First we went to the “PetSmart” market, a market not too many tourists know about that sounded pretty exotic. We got there and I immediately turned on “breath-through-your-mouth” mode. It didn’t smell great, and I’m sure I don’t want to know everything that is now on the soles of my shoes, but it was seriously the most unique thing I’ve ever seen. Cages and cages of birds, turtles, dogs, cats, bugs, fish, and anything else you can think of, but so unlike your American pet store. There was so much variety within the different animal groups- probably 15 different kinds of turtles and many more varieties of bugs- and I wanted to commend every person there for their open defiance of PETA. Probably my favorite things there were the little bug containers and crickets that were for sale- I looked around desperately trying to find someone who would agree that this was JUST like Mulan, but alas, James and Evan have probably never even seen it, so I had to keep that one to myself. “This cricket’s a lucky one!” So classic.

So next we went a few streets down to an antique market, where I will certainly be returning. There were very cool Chinese things- a little less trinkety- that I will need to spend my money on. After this and another market, we went to the Buddhist temple with the biggest jade Buddha. This was probably my favorite part of the afternoon. I’m pretty sure I have never been into a non-Abrahamic religion worship place before, so this was pretty new. There were so many huge, intricately decorated sculptures of the various gods and Buddhas and there was burning incense everywhere and people praying in a very unique way. I didn’t really get to take pictures, it seemed disrespectful to do so, but it was really fascinating. The jade Buddha itself was really pretty and had a neat story behind it: during the Cultural Revolution the government sent people into the temple to destroy it (as they did many of the other treasures of China) but the monks covered it with a large picture of Mao, which they weren’t allowed to touch or harm in any way. Anyway, the trick ended up saving this gorgeous statue. (Oh and what’s cuter than a little Asian toddler? How about a little Asian toddler praying next to her mom to the jade Buddha? It seriously was heart-melting.)

So after this we headed back to the metro, Evan and I got dinner (at a restaurant where everyone stared at us, surprise surprise), and now I’m relaxing for the rest of the evening. Overall, I’d say it was a pretty awesome weekend!!