Trip to Kumbum Monastery

Today we took a tour to Kumbum (Taer Si) Monastery. It is essentially the only noteworthy sight near Xining. Having said that, I must make clear that it was breathtaking. It is set in a hillside in a small village town. It is one of the six largest Geluk (Yellow Hat) monasteries in the world. The Kumbum was established in 1560 to mark the birthplace of Tsongkapa, founder of the Geluk School of Buddhaism.

While we admired the architectural beauty, the locals admired us. We weren't counting, but if I had to guess I would say our photos was taken several hundred times. We tried to get some of the monks to take a picture with us, but they did not want to do that. They didn't mind if you took their picture, but they didn't want to be in one with us. The temple was very moving spiritually, as were the people. We were a little surprised to see monks with cell phones and large satellite dishes in front of the temples. Modern conveniences have reach even the smallest Chinese towns.

After our tour of the temple we returned to the hotel and had lunch. By this point in the trip, we are all missing familiar foods. So we decided to give the hotel western style restaurant a chance. We ordered pizza, pasta, french fries and a club sandwich for all of us. We choose vegetable pizza and a meatless pasta sauce (this seemed the safest choice) and all of it was pretty good. In fact, we kept saying how good it all was. I pointed out that these same items in the U.S. would only taste okay, but given our American food deprivation they tasted delicious.

We went upstairs and took a nap. We must have been pretty tired (we still haven't adjusted to the time change) because we took a four hour nap . . . all of us. This further threw off our sleeping schedules, so I'm not sure we are ever going to adjust. As you can see, it was a pretty uneventful day.