1,611 Stairs

It is May Holiday!! Kelly, our native coordinator, said that since the Chinese don't have weekends, they take a lot of holidays. But this holiday is celebrated around the world. It is known as May Day! To kick off our May Day celebration on Thursday, and because we thought we'd have the day off, we watched a movie with our kids. We showed the kids "Kung Fu Panda." They loved it! I have NEVER seen them so well behaved. I think the candy we bribed them with helped too. It was nice to be with all of them and not have to be getting after them. I felt like we bonded a little more.

Today we woke up early to enjoy a yummy America tradtion. We went to Mai Dong Lao (McDonald's in Chinese). Then we got in a taxi to visit a pagoda we see almost every Sunday. We called Tim to tell the taxi driver where we wanted to go. Somewhere the translation got mixed up and we ended up at the newly built Buddhist temple. It was a good mix up. This was traditional Chinese culture, and it was beautifully built. We bought our tickets, and started hiking up the mountainside. It was just like the part on Kung Fu Panda where he tries to climb all the steps on the mountain to reach the temple and watch the fight.

To give you an idea of how crazy the hike was, imagine how many steps (actual stairs) you climb in a day. 20 steps make a story. Probably you go up and down the ones in your house three or four times, plus a couple of curb sides, and maybe a couple of ten-stair sets leading up to buildings and rich people's houses. That gives you about 85 stair steps. We hiked up over 1,600 stairs, then turned around, and hiked back down all 1,600. I painstakingly counted them one at a time. Bruce nonchalantly counted them two at a time, skipping down the mountain, and almost had a accident.

There were crazy large temples, and we got pictures of them. There were dozens of HUGE jade statues, and a giant fountain shooting water in different patterns. At the top there were real Chinese monks with their hair long and tied up in a funny bun, and they would let you bow down and pray to their statues if you wanted to (and also drop some money in a box). We chose not to. To our surprise, there were thousands of fake Chinese dollars and paper coins scattered all up and down the mountain, pinned down with rocks. It's like monopoly money that they leave for the gods or their deceased relatives, to use as money in the afterlife. They also leave real fruit for the statues on platters, for them to eat in the afterlife. The whole trip was pretty fun and interesting.