Playing with Swimming Friends

After a relaxing Saturday, today I went to a Buddhist temple called Luo Dai to "play" with my swimming friends. There is a word in Chinese, wanr, that the Chinese use all the time and means to go so something fun but is literally translated as "play" and I love it. It is one of my favorite words. Anyways, the place was really cool. It was in the mountains by a lake about 45 minutes outside of Chengdu. The Buddhist Temple was cool and beautiful, but alot like all the other Buddhist temple in China. The cool part about this one was that there was a huge stone wall, like a mini great wall, that you walked on up and down mountains for like 3 miles to get to the temple. The scenery was beautiful and it felt really good to get out of the city. It was foggy and kind of mysterious-seeming too. The wall was equipped with, like every Chinese tourist site, people selling snacks and incense every 50 yards. The most common snacks here were pineapple on a stick, sunflower seeds, corn on the cob and candy corn. The amount and availability of food in China still amazes me.
The temple was very pretty too. Some of my swimming friends lit incense and prayed in front of the Buddha statue. On the way down we took a different route that was a smaller path with stone steps that went by alot of carved Buddhist statues from the Tang Dynasty. The age of things here is amazing too. These are hundreds of years old. We just don't have stuff like that in the US.
After arriving at the bottom we walked around the tourist village for awhile and had lunch. Then we returned back to ChuanDa to go swimming. After that Huangjie and another lady took me out to Huo Guo. It is good, but it is so greasy and spicy that I never feel good afterwards and I don't like that. I wish they would just take me out to noodles or something. But it is really fun to hang out with them and I can tell I am getting better at Chinese everyday. I can actually have a semi-normal conversation now and I lasted all day in Chinese. I used to fall apart after like half a day and my brain would just get too tired. So that is exciting. It gives me confidence as I go into finals week next week, I have taken 3 now and have 5 left. The three I have already taken are my Chinese movie watching class, TaiChi, and Chinese Composition. They have all gone pretty well so far. Tomorrow I have Reading Comprehension, which is the class I am most worried about. Wish me luck!