Chengde

After Jinshanling, the group piled back into the bus and headed up north to Chengde. Chengde is a city that has many historical sites, but is very gritty and badly polluted. When we finally arrived at the hotel, which was decked out in touristy fashion, ten of us went for a walk through city. The pollution was so bad that it was hard to breathe. People sold lots of fruit and vegetables on the street corners and it smelled pretty bad at every street corner. It was very cold there, colder than Beijing, and our hands were freezing even through our gloves and mittens. But the people were so friendly. And apparently they don't see many white people because they kept pointing at us and saying "hello!" "hello!" - the only English word they know.

After we got back, we were fed an enormous amount of food. It was just overwhelming, and that's how we continued to be fed for the duration of the trip. There would be eight of us around the table, and the waitress would bring out at least ten heaping plates of food (some unrecognizable) but all pretty spicy and really good.

Mountain Palace

The next day we headed out to the Emperors Mountain Resort. We were told that this is where the emperors would go to escape the head. As all the heat left our own bodies in the zero degree weather, we were wondering why the professors chose the winter to take us to somewhere colder than Beijing. But it was nice in the end because there were no throngs of tourists. There was just us, freezing our limbs off.

The Resort consists of a palace complex with various rooms dedicated to eating, sleeping, and other activities emperors did. After we passed through the complex, there is a mountain that you can hike up to two small temples of worship at the top. There were wild deer, and a frozen over lake that we immediately walked on. The lake started to crack just as we got to the other side, but a kind Chinese man informed us while we were screaming that we weren't going to die: the lake is shallow and frozen solid. After an hour and a half all sixty of us were huddled in a souvenir shop waiting for the buses to come back, and hoping that the feeling in our fingers and toes would come back too!

Putuo ZongCheng Temple

After an extravagant lunch, we set off to another part of Chengde to see a temple called Putuo Zongcheng. I've never seen anything so beautiful, or complex. The temple is actually 12 temples that are all located up the side of a mountain. Most of the temples, all dedicated to different Buddhas, are small, but the temple at the top was huge. We walked up so many steps to get there and when we got to the top, and the view was amazing. We could see all the way down the mountain. The air was a lot clearer and the weather had gotten warmer since that morning, so seeing the temple was a lot more pleasant than the Mountain Resort!

Puning Temple

Puning Temple was our next stop in Chengde. This is a temple that has been dedicated entirely to large Buddhas. In fact, there is a 130 foot Buddha in the very last temple in the complex. There were also musicians in pink cowboy hats who would play Jingle Bells is you gave them 100 Yuan. Go figure. But this temple was also very beautiful and intricate.