Day 3

day 3

markets
Temple Fire
hostel to hotel
mmmm... grand hyatt for free
sleeping from 5pm to 6am

The next day we woke up and knew we had to get out of the hostel by noon. We showered quickly in the very economical bathroom/shower room. Basically there is one 4 foot by 6 foot room for taking a dump and for showering. You just close the toilet and turn on the faucet directly above the toilet to take advantage of the multi use facility as you get clean in the same place where some of the most dirty deeds are done. I guess that's some sort of ying and yang balance for you.

We headed out to a Taoist Temple that morning and checked out the architecture and the main prayer room as we tried our best to keep the smoke out our eyes. I guess the thing to do here is somewhat like the candles that people light in Catholic churches. Except that in the Taoist Temple they light packs of wooden sticks and walk around with the smoke filling the air. It was kind of cool to see until your eyes started watering and your nose was full of smoke. This particular temple was in honor of a sheperd that had been known to heal people a long time ago. He died and when he came back he had healing powers that everyone pursued him for. Sounds like another story I know. Ryan and I wondered whether the people actually thought this sheperd historically existed or whether is was a tradition and less of a historical thing like Christians believe the historical Jesus did. We never found out for sure.

We came back to the hostel and packed our crap up and I got a quick skype call in to my family back in Atlanta. Then we jumped over to the benefits of Ryan's reward points and plopped ourselves down in the Grand Hyatt- holy smokes, no multi-use toilet showers here! It was probably the nicest hotel I've ever been in. The hostess showed us to our room and opened our curtains for us if that's any indication.

I basically went to sleep at that point because I was dead. It was around 5pm. Ryan went out to see the Peak view that I'd done earlier and when he came back he also crashed. I logged some serious hours as Kicker would say and woke up at 6 am the next day. I needed it.