West Lake

Our travel itinerary for China said: 5 days Beijing, then spend the rest of our 2,5 weeks in the mountains of South China. But after looking at the weather forecast over there (thunderstorms, rain, temperatures over 35 degrees), we decided to shorten the trip down south and look for drier alternatives. So we flew to Shanghai and stayed a couple of days in this eastern part of China. I will write about super modern (and ugly, in my opinion) Shanghai later, but first we went to Hangzhou. Many Chinese love this place and vacation there and we easily found out why. Unlike other places, it has a huge lake and is surrounded by mountains, which gives it a pleasant and fresh vibe. Almost like Geneva!

We couch surfed with Charlie (you'll see him in one of the pictures) and once again, we had an amazing time! Charlie just graduated from NYU and was spending the summer with his parents in Hangzhou. In September he's moving to Switzerland where he'll be studying at a very prestigious business school, so we'll meet him again!

One of the highlights of our trip to Hangzhou was our visit to the Lingyin temple. This temple is part of a big buddhist center, with several monasteries, pagodas, buddhist rock carvings and other smaller temples. Very busy when you enter it, but once you've walked away from the crowds and you've climbed some hills, you'll find yourself in more quiet parts of this religious retreat. When we were taking a rest, a monk came up to us and tried to start a conversation. A bit later, a women, apparently his English teacher, joined us. She had been encouraging him to speak to foreigners and practice his English. So we started to talk to both of them, taking advantage of this opportunity to ask the monk all our questions about Buddhism, monks, monasteries, female monks,....He replied to everything and his teacher patiently translated. After all, he had just started his classes:-)

The teacher herself was also very interesting. She explained that she was about to retire and that after her retirement, she wanted to become a buddhist nun. The monk she was teaching, was her master, helping her to prepare her future. Even though it is very hard to become a monk, becoming a nun is even more complicated. Women have to follow more rules and harder trainings because they are believed to have more emotions and more passions than men, which are hard to let go of. Well, it seems a bit unfair but in a way it makes sense.

We spent about an hour and a half with these two people and it probably sounds very cliché, but after this meeting we felt very humble and quiet, determined not to be focused so much on the materialistic side of life. (well, that's a bit easier when you're traveling, I guess)