The Swift Family Blog : June 12

Today we decided to do a few more parks and temples in the city. But first was breakfast. We found a few things on the street, but we also wanted to get some rice in bamboo leaves – it is a traditional dragon boat festival food. We say a place that sold them on the street the other day, so we went there first. There was a few of us standing in line to get them, but then they said that they were sold out all the way through the dragon boat festival (June 18^th) and people were only picking up their orders right now. As we were starting to leave though the shop owner came up to me and told me if I waited until the crowd departs they would give us some for free. They asked how many we wanted. I felt bad about getting them for free so I told them just one. After eating it though I wish I would have told them a lot more since they were so delicious. We did end up buying some for lunch at a different store, but they didn’t compare in flavor to the one that we were given. No matter where you buy them from they all have the same thing in them – rice, meat, an egg yolk, and a single mushroom. But the seasoning was especially good at the one that was sold out.

After buying our food we first went to an old martial arts academy. This one was originally set up by the Japanese. It was cool looking from the outside, but it had been given to an elementary school and was now their gym. Since it was a school day, we couldn’t go in to check out the inside. The schools here all have gates around them and usually some type of gardens on their grounds. We sat a while at one of the gardens that was half inside the school grounds and half outside the school grounds. Since we were looking at the martial arts academy, I gave the children a few ninja challenges to so some of their skills. Mainly, it was challenges to squeeze through the gate around the school and go touch different things. Julia wouldn’t participated, but the rest of them all accomplished their ninja tasks.

After that we went to a Confucius temple. The Confucius temples here are a lot different from the Buddhist and Taoist ones. They are generally less ornate and all strive to be a little more peaceful and calm. That means they usually have several courtyards instead of being right on the street. This one had a turtle pond which the children loved.

Next was an old fort gate to the city. This was the only one that is still fully in tact that used to be around the city back during the Dutch rule. We played around there for a little bit and pretended to storm the gate as a family. From the top we also had a view of the grounds for a high school and so we watched the students play for a little while during their gym time.

After that we went to a temple that was dedicated to the five concubines who committed suicide right before Prince Ningjing did. This temple was located in the middle of a park and in it the children found a frog. They all wanted to hold it which I am sure freaked the frog out a lot.

Then we found one more park. This one had a ton of old people in it as usual, but many of them seemed like they were homeless. Several came to look at our kids, but they didn’t have the same boundaries that we had seen in the people in the past – several just picked up the kids without asking or started touching their faces and things like that.

For dinner we ate soup dumplings, shaved ice, and had some yogurt drinks back at the apartment.

You can see the racks of the bamboo rice things in this picture.

At the old martial arts academy.

At the Confucius temple.

There was a couple taking wedding pictures in front of this character sign. I thought it would make a pretty cool background.

They had built a gift shop around the Confucius statue at the temple.

Enjoying the bamboo rice things.

One of the bigger banyan trees. These things are massive, but surprisingly the huge ones are only like 80 years old. Given their size I was imagining several hundred years.

Outside the gate.

I learned about this style of building gates when I was in China. So they have an outer wall with a door and that door opens up to a small courtyard that is up against the real wall and gate. I guess they would let the enemy's army (or a group of them) get into the courtyard and then they would be stuck there and they could shoot them with arrows or pour boiling oil on them or things like that. Check out that tree that is growing down the wall. The boys found out that they could climb all the way up the wall that way.