A
few months ago, on our very first Tuesday adventure,
Nareesa and I tried to find
Zhinan temple. We wound up hiking through a suburban subdivision, then up a hill to a dead end that ended in a crypt, and we were chased by wild dogs through a nose-picker trail up a million mossy stairs to a dead end. We've never lived it down, but this Tuesday we decided we were going to try and find the temple again, and we took
Nareesa's mom and brother with us. Our friends, very worried, warned us
repeatedly and offered their cell phone numbers if we got into any trouble. Have some faith! We found it on our first try this time. The trail started as all good trails do- with a million stairs.
Some of us handled the stairs better than others.
Before we entered the trail I saw an old man in a wheelchair and I asked him "
Chee-nan ma?" and pointed up the stairs to make sure we were going the right way. After 20 minutes of straight climbing we met another woman and
Nareesa (who, at this point, has
zeezo faith in my directions) double checked with her and yes, we were headed the right way. We soon arrived at the base of the temple and hiked MORE STAIRS to get to it.
As soon as we stepped into the temple we were assaulted by two ladies who insisted that we take red and gold necklaces from them. They blessed them with incense, gave them to us and then held out their hands for money. At first we didn't know they wanted money, because they were just drawing on their hands and speaking Chinese at us- then a guy translated that the necklaces were $100NT each, so we gave them back to the ladies and they went off in a defeated huff.
Food offerings left out at the temple. For your convenience, there are many stores on site that sell food that you can leave on a table for Buddha. One of the stores sold American root beer and
Tostitos (neither of which are usually available in Taiwan) if you'd like to leave Buddha something with a bit more international flair.
This fancy red and gold temple featured a vending machine, which seemed a little out of place with the rest of the site.
Taiwan loves clutter! Even hidden around the corners of a beautiful temple were old boxes, furniture, and (above) some cleaning supplies.
This room was full of cabinets with golden statues of the gods. The fact that they look like slot machines might be no coincidence, since there were donation boxes full of money at the base of each statue.
I especially liked the ceiling carvings, which were made to look like clouds and dragons.
Just when we were about to leave we looked outside and noticed that there was a sign (all in Chinese) that had some arrows pointing up a little path behind the temple. Curious, we followed the path to see what was there. And guess what we found?
Zhinan Temple!!! We had just been visiting a smaller shrine the whole time, we hadn't even seen the temple yet. We were not meant to find this place, were we?
This was a much bigger temple, full of red and
blingy gold architecture and paintings. This is, by far, the nicest temple I've seen in Taiwan and trust me, we see a lot of
friggin' temples.
Here's a video tour of one area of the temple. It's hard to capture the
bigness in a picture, so check out the video.
When we were ready to leave, we decided to take a bus rather than going back down all those stairs. It had rained quite a bit and we weren't about to try going down a million wet, mossy stairs after victoriously finding our temple. When we got to the bus station the bus driver was asleep and we weren't even really sure that the buses were running. I mean, the bus had an ad for "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" on it... how old is that movie?? However, the bus driver woke up especially for us, lit himself a cigarette and then smoked while he drove (
WTF!!!) us to the
Gongguan area of Taipei.
We hadn't
originally planned to go to
Gongguan, but that was the end destination of the bus and we knew there was a good night market there, so we decided
Gongguan would be a good place to get some supper. We went to Kiwi Gourmet Burger, which we'd visited once before a few months ago, and we happily found that the prices had been lowered quite a bit. I got a bacon and
gouda burger with garlic fries and it was so good!!! Thank you,
Nareesa's mom for treating us- it was delicious!
There were boobies in the bathroom of the burger place :P
We walked around the night market for a bit and wound up finding a Greek restaurant that we had unsuccessfully tried to find months ago. It really felt like we were solving a lot of mysteries today by finally finding the temple and then the restaurant. We also found a strange clothing store that had creepy bird mannequins. Me like!
We take our jobs as tour guides quite seriously, so we decided to end the night by taking Mom and Ryan to the
Chiang Kai-
Shek Memorial Hall. The main building was closed but they got to see what the area looked like. It's still impressive, even at night. When we got back to
Sinjhaung we met up with Mel and Christine for coffee and cake at
Ikari Coffee to celebrate their last Tuesday Club and
GEPT evening classes of the semester- trust me, this is something to celebrate- and then we went to the night market to get a mosquito zapper. Look out
mosquitos, I'm armed.
A few months ago, on our very first Tuesday adventure, Nareesa and I tried to find Zhinan temple. We wound up hiking through a suburban subdivision, then up a hill to a dead end that ended in a crypt, and we were chased by wild dogs through a nose-picker trail up a million mossy stairs to a dead end. We've never lived it down, but this Tuesday we decided we were going to try and find the temple again, and we took Nareesa's mom and brother with us. Our friends, very worried, warned us repeatedly and offered their cell phone numbers if we got into any trouble. Have some faith! We found it on our first try this time. The trail started as all good trails do- with a million stairs.
Some of us handled the stairs better than others.
Before we entered the trail I saw an old man in a wheelchair and I asked him "Chee-nan ma?" and pointed up the stairs to make sure we were going the right way. After 20 minutes of straight climbing we met another woman and Nareesa (who, at this point, has zeezo faith in my directions) double checked with her and yes, we were headed the right way. We soon arrived at the base of the temple and hiked MORE STAIRS to get to it.
As soon as we stepped into the temple we were assaulted by two ladies who insisted that we take red and gold necklaces from them. They blessed them with incense, gave them to us and then held out their hands for money. At first we didn't know they wanted money, because they were just drawing on their hands and speaking Chinese at us- then a guy translated that the necklaces were $100NT each, so we gave them back to the ladies and they went off in a defeated huff.
Food offerings left out at the temple. For your convenience, there are many stores on site that sell food that you can leave on a table for Buddha. One of the stores sold American root beer and Tostitos (neither of which are usually available in Taiwan) if you'd like to leave Buddha something with a bit more international flair.
This fancy red and gold temple featured a vending machine, which seemed a little out of place with the rest of the site.
Taiwan loves clutter! Even hidden around the corners of a beautiful temple were old boxes, furniture, and (above) some cleaning supplies.
This room was full of cabinets with golden statues of the gods. The fact that they look like slot machines might be no coincidence, since there were donation boxes full of money at the base of each statue.
I especially liked the ceiling carvings, which were made to look like clouds and dragons.
Just when we were about to leave we looked outside and noticed that there was a sign (all in Chinese) that had some arrows pointing up a little path behind the temple. Curious, we followed the path to see what was there. And guess what we found? Zhinan Temple!!! We had just been visiting a smaller shrine the whole time, we hadn't even seen the temple yet. We were not meant to find this place, were we?
This was a much bigger temple, full of red and blingy gold architecture and paintings. This is, by far, the nicest temple I've seen in Taiwan and trust me, we see a lot of friggin' temples.
When we were ready to leave, we decided to take a bus rather than going back down all those stairs. It had rained quite a bit and we weren't about to try going down a million wet, mossy stairs after victoriously finding our temple. When we got to the bus station the bus driver was asleep and we weren't even really sure that the buses were running. I mean, the bus had an ad for "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" on it... how old is that movie?? However, the bus driver woke up especially for us, lit himself a cigarette and then smoked while he drove (WTF!!!) us to the Gongguan area of Taipei.
We hadn't originally planned to go to Gongguan, but that was the end destination of the bus and we knew there was a good night market there, so we decided Gongguan would be a good place to get some supper. We went to Kiwi Gourmet Burger, which we'd visited once before a few months ago, and we happily found that the prices had been lowered quite a bit. I got a bacon and gouda burger with garlic fries and it was so good!!! Thank you, Nareesa's mom for treating us- it was delicious!
There were boobies in the bathroom of the burger place :P
We walked around the night market for a bit and wound up finding a Greek restaurant that we had unsuccessfully tried to find months ago. It really felt like we were solving a lot of mysteries today by finally finding the temple and then the restaurant. We also found a strange clothing store that had creepy bird mannequins. Me like!
We take our jobs as tour guides quite seriously, so we decided to end the night by taking Mom and Ryan to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. The main building was closed but they got to see what the area looked like. It's still impressive, even at night. When we got back to Sinjhaung we met up with Mel and Christine for coffee and cake at Ikari Coffee to celebrate their last Tuesday Club and GEPT evening classes of the semester- trust me, this is something to celebrate- and then we went to the night market to get a mosquito zapper. Look out mosquitos, I'm armed.
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