Tuesday the 22nd... Lama temple and "home" in Beijing ;)

now, finally (it is now Sunday the 27th) I have the time to write what I did last Tuesday, the 22nd!!
First of all, I went with Megan (USA) to the Lama temple. The Lama temple is the largest Tibetian temple outside of Tibet which is still actively in use…meaning there are still monks living there as well as many Buddhists coming there to pray. It is full of colours and smells and just quite impressive. Anyhow… as you can imagine… after seeing the Summer Palace on Sunday, the Temple of Heaven on Monday, the Lama temple now seemed quite similar, even though it was different… in a way. Anyhow, also because it’s much smaller than the other palaces, we had seen everything after about two hours. So what do we do with the day? Lets see whats close by on the map! Oh… well… you know… uhm… there is, I mean, would you maybe, like, to uhm.. go to the IKEA??? hahahhah yesssss…so we actually went (to satisfy my addiction) to the IKEA in Beijing! This is by the way the largest IKEA in the world. I was happy!! BUT… dont think that that was so easy!! First of all, we took a subway to the station closest by. From there, we took a street which seemed to go into the right direction… the street went through an area were there are obviously only seldomly any tourists, if there ever was one. The locals looked at us as if we just emerged from Pluto… but other than that they didn’t care much about us, which was a nice change from the many beggars in the city centre. Here, they seemed to be very poor, but still accepting there situation and it actually made the impression as if they were satisfied with their lifes. It was very interessting to walk through there. At the end of the street we came to a large park, which had, on my greatest map ever, an entrance right were we were, and an exit exactly on the other side…. where we assumed the IKEA! So, lets take the straight way through. Done so.. and walked for about a half an hour through this exceptionally funny (yes that is really possible) we had still not found an exit. Why the park was so funny? well, it was full of Chinglish again… had funny signs all over, and made the overall impression that it was made for the case of a huge immergency, like a meteor destroying the rest of the world and only this little park surviving, as it had “emergency dwells” (invisible though ;) ) and special spaces all over for “emergency makeshift tents” (as to evacuate?) … though we were absolutely positive about the fact that there has never ever even stood anything close to a tent in this park… however… this all doesnt matter, we were urgently (addiction signs becoming more obvious with the closer approach to the IKEA) looking for the exit. We had by then of course seen the ultimate and absolutely unmistakable IKEA blue building with IKEA yellow letters on it and were close to hyperventilation due to all the excitement… when we found out (through asking a park gardener) that there was actually no exit on this end and we had to go all the way back and then alllll the way around the park, cross over or under a highway and then approch the destination from it’s rear side. We were devasted that, even though we actually were already in smelling distance of the one and only, we were so brutally rebuffed. Anyhow, there was no other solution (no wings mysteriously growing on us) so we turned our backs on the IKEA (not to understand methaphorically please) and took it as our duty to embrace the challenge… so, exhausted but happy we arrived about a half an hour later and celebrated our achievement with some Swedish “Kötbullar” meatballs and salmon! For my dear colleagues back in Holland I can say that IKEA is pretty much the same here, but everything is cheaper as in Breda (what costs 1 € over there costs about 1-5 Yuan here… so between 0,10 and 0,50 €), but since these prices are still quite high for Chinese standart, it is really the higher class people who shop here. Too bad, I think it takes some of the IKEA culture away (very sad moment here ;) )… and something I was especially interessted in was seeing that even though this store is 8 times as large as the one in Breda, they have not more articles, only more on stock. The only article I found that they dont have much of is cutlery (forks, knives, spoons….) and instead they have a L A R G E variety of chopstics of different designs!! seems quite logic to me!!!
So, after this great escape of the outside world I almost felt like back home, and after some melancholy we left and went back to the hostel! And at night we had a funny dinner with Jen (England), William (France), Neil (Wales) and Megan and I.

some things I learned that day:
- they have the same trashcans in Beijing as in Germany, also having the “OTTO” sticker on them!!
- I can count to 10 in chinese… yi, ar, sun, si, wuo, liu, chi, ba, chiu, shi,… shiyi, shiar… it’s actually quite easy
- Beijing is actually quite prepared for emergencies of any kind (wonder if there is some kind of nuclear protection zone over this park as well)
- at the IKEA in Beijing they fold the yellow bags after the customers put the back… they obviously have either to many bored employees…

I can not upload any more pictures here, so all future ones will be on www.claudia-schmitz.medion-fotoalbum.de