Sunday, November 7, 2010

Things To Do In Jianshui

At the moment, I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Sapa, Vietnam, sipping a milk coffee and trying to get up to date in my writing. I’m only a few days behind. As far as posting . . . well, that’s a different story. It’s October 29, I’m getting ready to write about October 24, and I don’t think this will get posted until around November 7. We’re getting closer, though. Stupid Chinese restrictions.

Okay, the 24th. After spending a few days in Kunming, the group headed off on a four-hour bus ride to Jianshui. After several overnight trains, we could do a 4-hour bus ride standing on one foot. Anyway, we were heading towards Jianshui and if I knew about only the Stone Forest with respect to Kunming, I knew even less about Jianshui.

We arrived early in the afternoon and after some clean-up time, we all went to lunch. I forget the name of the restaurant that we went to but it was so good that we ended up eating both lunch and dinner there the next day. There was nothing fancy about the food – we had chicken, beef, pork and local vegetables – but everything was delicious. Afterwards, we went on an orientation walk. There really wasn’t much to that because Jianshui is a rather small town. During lunch, I had heard about two things that interested me – the Zhu Garden and the local Confucius Temple. Since we had the entire next day in Jianshui, I figured I would see them then. I figured wrong.

Our orientation walk went straight to Zhu’s Garden, which was very close to the restaurant at which we ate. It cost about six dollars U.S. to enter. The garden was the private garden of the Zhu family, which came to the area poor and then became rather prominent. The garden is about 20,000 s.m. It also has a hotel in the complex. I walked around a bit with everybody, but to be honest, I wasn’t particularly impressed. I got bored and, thinking it was the end of the orientation walk, I went back to the hotel. I figured I’d have some coffee, maybe take a nap, and go to the temple the next day. I figured wrong, once again.

I received a text message from the tour leader wondering where I was and if I was going to the temple. Since everybody else was going to the temple, I thought I would too. We headed over to the Jianshui Temple of Confucius, which was originally built in 1285. As much as I was bored by Zhu’s Garden, I was impressed with the Jianshui Temple of Confucius. There were dozens of structures and many plaques with explanations of each structure in English, which is always a plus. One of the more interesting things I learned was to look for bomb damage because the complex was bombed three times by the Japanese in 1941.

Later, we met for dinner, which wasn’t as good as lunch. People were talking about what to do the next day and, frankly, there wasn’t much else in Jianshui that interested me. There was a nearby village that some people were visiting. There also was a local bridge, which interested me a little more. I figured that I’d decide what to do the next morning at breakfast.

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