As you may have heard there was bit of a disturbance in Beijing this past week that was kicked off by the possible assault of a young woman from the Anhui province - to the southeast of Beijing - in a shopping center in Beijing. The young woman fell to her death and it was reported by the authorities that she had committed suicide and nothing else was said.
The twitter of China - Weibo (way bwoh) - quickly disseminated the story and a report that she had been raped by security guards at the mall and then been thrown (or possible jumped out of shame) by her attackers and the local police were covering up the story. A large scale protest materialized and the authorities called out the riot police in mass. The mouthpiece of the government reported that 100 individuals had gathered and they were mainly from the young woman's hometown. The pictures on Weibo clearly showed that 100 wasn't even close. The riot police had amassed and were preventing the crowed from moving out the area outside the shopping center where the incident took place. Reports stated that it had been place to march to Tian'anmen Square but this was successfully blocked.
After reading about all this activity on Thursday Julie and I decided it seemed like a good weekend to stay in Mentougou. Of the many attractions in Mentougou there are two famous Buddhist temples that are just a short bus ride away from our home. In spite of the projected high temps (95 on Saturday) I decided we should take advantage of our close proximity and visit a temple on Saturday. Adding to our plans, while I was at kindergarten on Friday morning the teacher - she referred to herself as Snow in her email as she doesn't have an English name and that is the literal translation of her given name - there that speaks the best English asked if Julie and I would like to play basketball with her and her boyfriend on Saturday.
It had been well over a month since I made it to play basketball on the weekends and we planned to meet Snow and her boyfriend at 8:30, so I decided to go warm-up with the guys at 7. After an hour with the guys I went back to the room to get some breakfast and see if Julie was ready. We made it back down to the school gate to meet Snow and Sharon (her boyfriend's English name) and we headed into the gym for some HORSE and a Chinese version of around the world. The highlight was probably when I popped one of the rubber basketballs while attempting a trick shot over the back of the backboard. I really am special.
After basketball time we got cleaned up and relaxed for a bit before we headed out to the bus stop to make our way up the mountain to a temple. We hadn't decided which temple just yet. The road made me feel like I was back in the WNC mountains and the bus driver didn't want to waste any brakes on silly things like curves. The ride wasn't long and we had reached the Jietai temple; that's how we picked, the one we came to first. This temple has some of the oldest known pine trees in northern China and well who doesn't like old oddly shaped pine trees?
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| This is the pagoda hugging pine. The pine is over a thousand years old and while only a couple of the main limbs have survived the centuries that's still pretty impressive. It is hugging the tomb pagoda which I'm sure has an interesting story but I was much more interested in the tree. |
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| At the bottom of the picture you can see a row of umbrellas. Unfortunately our old camera couldn't really show off the details but Julie was a big fan. You can also see the massive flower candles. |
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| A common feature at parks, garden's and temples throughout china are stone steles. The one in front of you has a tortoise for the base, which was very common of man of the steles at Jietai, and dragons tangled at the top. On the face of the stele are carved writings, poems and stories. |
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| Here is another one. More dragons. |
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| Speaking of dragons. This is the sleeping dragon pine. I don't really see it but behind Julie the tree is growing out of the bank and the trunk appears to be dropping towards the ground. I've never seen a trunk in quite that disposition. |
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| Speaking of unique trees here's one that couldn't be denied to reach for the sky. |
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| I couldn't pass up this photo op. How often do you see a 'dragish' or should it be called a 'figon'? |
Julie found a few flowers:
And then she had a visitor. Can you spot it?
Well after all that talk about staying out of the city we hadn't heard much news of any other issues and well we hadn't had Italian food it quite sometime so on Sunday we followed our cravings into the city. While I haven't had lasagna in a long time and might not be the best judge, but it was really good. We've made it back to Mentougou and are settling in for the night before we head back to work in the AM.
Hope this finds you well.
Ryan
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