On Saturday we went in search of the Jade Buddha Temple, which we found on our map. We looked it up online and saw that it housed a few Buddha statues made out of real jade, so we thought it would be pretty cool. We hopped on the train and got off at the nearest station and then walked around. Usually for bigger sites, there are signs around pointing us dumb tourists in the right direction, but for this temple there were none. We saw this as a sign that maybe it wasn't so touristy and we would get to see something special. When we finally found it, we saw hoards of Chinese people lining up to go in, and as we waited in line for our tickets we were bombarded with beggars who obviously knew where to go to find a crowd. Once we were inside, we saw a huge crowd of people praying everywhere, which we figured must be because of the closeness of the New Year. When we walked around it was still pretty cool with all of the ornate buildings and statues, but it was all very commercial and we couldn't help but notice the distinct lack of jade. You had to pay to see the bigger statues and to basically do anything but walk around.
Decked out for the New Year.
Cool statue thing made up of a bunch of tiny different Buddhas.
This picture won't flip, but it's one of only two jade Buddhas we saw in the temple.. the other one had a no pictures allowed sign in front of it.
After visiting the temple, we walked back to the train station through a park filled with cool statues. Here's a few pictures of the cooler ones.
It looked like such a treacherous journey for all of them.. what you don't see is the path I was standing on that they could've just taken.
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