Day 15

After the Worst Night Ever Callan had the Best Night Ever - she slept the whole night without waking up. :)

Today we had a couple of tours - one of the Six Banyan Buddhist Temple where a Buddhist monk performed a ceremony to bless the babies. Guangzhou is a big city and the temple is nestled right in the downtown area. The Chinese leave some trees growing out of buildings in order to preserve the 'feng shui' - we saw this at a hospital on the way to the temple. Once you're in the temple you wouldn't know that you are in the city - it was quite peaceful with a lot of incense burning everywhere. The blessing took about 10 minutes and was basically a peaceful chant with everyone kneeling on big red cushions. Later we looked around the rest of the temple and found an elementary class outside having some sort of lesson - mostly boys and a couple of girls. On the way back to the bus Chris started giving money to the beggars and almost caused a near riot - Jason had to intervene and pull us to safety :)

After that we went to the Chen Family Temple Museum. This is the best preserved Qing Dynasty building in the Guandong Province and was built around 1890. It had colored porcelain and lime sculptures on all the roofs, stone carvings, wood carvings, brick carvings, ivory carvings - lots of carvings. It also had a set of sculptures about a character called Ah Q who was the central character in Lu Xun's famous book 'The True Story of Ah Q'. This book was written during the revolutionary period in China (around 1930) and Lu Xun is considered the father of modern Chinese literature. The sculptures are quite funny, I hope to post a few pictures later.

After that we went to a government run arts and crafts store. We bought our escape for about $15 - not too bad.

The afternoon was another Big Event - the baby physical. As with all these steps it was nerve-wracking but it went fine. Callan didn't cry until the she got the cold stethoscope treatment. Basically they get the temp, height, weight, head circumference, check the ears, eyes, nose, throat, and then all the limbs. Everything was fine.

At this point we're all ready to go home (again). No big night out - just watched Chinese TV and went to bed.

Going into the Buddhist temple

During the blessing by the monk. Chris in on the far end. Jack's on this end - he's not really that big - the camera makes him look smaller.

After the ceremonyLearning to prayKids in schoolIn the temple courtyardAt the Chen Family MuseumPorcelain under glassPorcelain for cashThese are examples of the roof carvingsSomebody sees daddy (that's Andrew in the seat behind us, Callan was fascinated by him).Later at the physical somebody evil gets the look