January 15th 2009
We woke up at 8 in the morning to meet Austin's friend 'Chou' and began our day by heading down to eat breakfast at a local restaurant. We ate a spicy GuiZhou breakfast consisting of a fried egg thrown in a soup with egg noodles, sprouts, red tofu (see past posts on congealed blood), and pig stomach (the last two of which I was able to dodge). We all climbed back into the car with Austin's dad's driver and headed up to the temple. The temple lied in a larger park which cost about 30 RMB a person but Austin wouldn't let us contribute. Chou, Austin, Carl, and I entered the park area to find it filled with people over the age of 40. As we climbed a hill to the entrance of an actual Buddhist temple, we saw a number of 40-somethings stretching, singing karaoke, line-dancing, sword dancing, and straight up chillin' and chatting with each other. Austin suggested that these people were retired and didn't have anything to do, so they came to the park.
At the top of the hill we entered the temple. My second on the trip. Austin knew about my interest in visiting the temples so he had our visit set up so we could eat lunch with the monks. We settled down to eat after walking around the temples and seeing an interesting worship ceremony (7 monks walked around a room chanting with an audio recording while a tv played in the front of the room which showed 5 buddha statues burning with flame - the color of the flame would change every few minutes). The lunch was spectacular maybe the best on the trip. It was prepared without meat, and very simple. Some fried green plants, some spicy dishes, and a bunch of rice...it wasn't very oily.
After eating lunch we left the temple and walked around the park a little more. We found ourselves on a ridge with signs posted all over saying do not get too close to the monkeys. After walking a little past the signs we found 10 or 15 monkeys running around causing a ruckus in the trees, bushes, and benches. After taking a few odd pictures we decided to continue on towards a zoo which was located in the park. Later on we were to find out that monkey's originally were not found in the park, but quite awhile ago, a few monkeys escaped from their cages and begun living up the road from the actual zoo.
The zoo was a depressing collection of cages the size of the average large room in the US. There was a lion, a leopard, a cheetah, a giant camel, a few cages of monkeys, peacocks, deer with their antlers shaved off, and a few other animals. We slowly worked our way through the area and out of the park.
We then went shopping for a bit, ate a spectacular dinner, played some Mahjong, went to the largest movie theater in the province to see a movie called Red Cliff or The Art of War. Carl and I just spent a while discussing this... We aren't sure which is the name of the film because the whole movie seemed like a long preview.
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