Temple, Wall, Lake, Heat

Rather than having cultural classes and Into the Community on Friday afternoon, we had a field trip! The whole group visited three places: Jiming Temple, Ming City Wall and Xuanwu Lake. The three are all clustered together so it was easy for us to visit all three in one fell swoop.

At the entrance of Jiming Temple

Jiming Temple is a Buddhist temple that covers the southern side of a steep hill. It has multiple buildings with statues of various Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. As we climbed the stairs from one building to another, Zhu Laoshi explained to participants the history of the temple and how Buddhists pray at the temple.

Lots of stairs!

Learning about incense burning

Leaving the temple from the rear exit we immediately came out on top of the Ming City Wall. It's one of the biggest and most complete city walls in China and overlooks the city on one side and Xuanwu Lake on the other. Xuanwu Lake is a large lake with several islands connected by bridges. We got to walk from the southern end of the lake to the western end by walking from island to island. By the end of that everyone was good and sweaty since it was over 90°F!