DAY SIX: PART II

This was written by Bard but is being posted by her mother while she's away at a choir retreat.

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The airport was sad and also exciting because
a) We were saying goodbye to Adam,
b) The trip was half over,
d) We were going to be on a plane again.
I was a little nervous about the last one. My ears had taken FOREVER to pop the last trip. I was also nervous that we would be on the plane for a finity. Ann hugged Adam before we left. He looked distinctly uncomfortable. I was jealous, but only a little. *grins*
For some reason customs took one of my waters, but the others were fine. I mean, I know they were checking them for drugs or something, but they even opened the sealed ones. We all had bottles of water, so this took a while. They left my razor, though.
When we got our boarding passes since we'd ordered as a group it didn't matter if we had our actual tickets or not. Mrs. C's son (Meg's brother) had me. I had Tiger. Kris (lucky duck) had TU. We were assigned to sit next to each other. I couldn't help but think that if I'd have gotten Tiger, but TU had gotten his own I'd be next to him. Anyway, I think I'd rather sit next to Kris. We talked for a while (about books, movies then politics) and I tried to write. I fell asleep. Not surprising. At lunch Ash got to sit with us since she told the guide that she wasn't vegetarian, just allergic to soy. That was rather nice. Then we talked to our new tour guide. I kind of felt bad for her because she was good, but of course we were all thinking of Adam. He had hard shoes to fill. Her name was Bu, I think. Anyway, she told us that now we were going to go to a temple. It was called the Ling Yin Temple. Bu told us about how the Monk who started the temple was reminded of home by the hill nearby. He said "That looks like the peak of a mountain from my village!" He was convinced that it had flown from it's former home to keep him company (or something). No one believed him, until he said "When I whistle, two monkeys, one black, one white, will jump out of the caverns under the peak." He whistled, and sure enough, two monkeys came to him. They immediately believed him, and they named it The Peak Flying From Afar. The other monks were so worried it would fly away again and carry off anyone one it they carved some sort of barrier in the many caverns. It must have worked, since the hill was still there when we visited. (Joke, hahafunny.)
The temple was quite surreal. There was incense burning all over the place. People used little stoves there to burn it. *coughcough* It was SO thick. I looked up at the sky and could actually see the smoke rising into the clouds, like it was some sort of factory. Ash, who has asthma, started getting really loopy and light-headed. It would have been funny if it weren't so scary. I thought she was going to faint. Anyway, we decided (partially because of that) to move away from the giant Buddha and look inside a building. You weren't allowed to burn incense in those. The Buddha we'd been admiring was enormous. It was probably two stories or more, but I could be wrong. It was all painted gold, and people came up and bowed to it and stuff. Some of the people looked like they were having spasms they bowed so hard. I wondered what would happen if someone actually did, and no one noticed.

The other building consisted of four giant statues (not as big as the Buddha) and we weren't allowed to take pictures. There were three men and one woman. The woman and pale man looked nice, but there was an African looking one and a red one that looked positively murderous. They were made so when you kneeled on the benches they looked at you. I would not want one of them looking at me. There were also two Christmas tree looking things that proved to be filled with tiny Buddha figurines. There was a large one in the center. We moved on to the other hall, which was filled with other Buddhas. Some of them looked nice, but some were scary. One had a man coming out of his chest! A bunch looked like they were holding huge paintbrushes. Ash started acting like they were talking to each other. She wasn't making fun, or anything, just saying things like "I'm going to flick you with my brush!" and "I have the arm of powah!" but Ann kept saying things like "Guys, don't be disrespectful." Which we weren't. I mean, we were the only ones in there anyway, and the hall was huge. No one would even have heard to be insulted. While we were there the monks started chanting. It was really cool. It was in Chinese, too, so it sounded even more eerie than chants usually do, because you can generally guess what Latin chants mean, but not Chinese.

We had time to climb The Peak Flying From Afar before we left, but only just. It was really steep, and it took us 15 minutes going top speed. Kris stopped halfway up because she didn't want to be late; she waited for us and was going to yell up if she saw the group. We were fine, though. Mrs. Jay's son got there about the same time we did, anyway. I don't think she would majorly chew him out as not only is he her son, he was also a chaperone. By the time we were finished we were all fairly dripping with sweat. Not pleasant a'tall, a'tall.

We left there, and Ash told me that when she was under the influence (incense) she had been going to ask me about Hank, who'd quit choir two years ago after we went to Italy! She was definitely out of it.

Con't...