10,000 Buddhas and 12 angry monkeys

Yesterday was fairly action packed. I took a ton of pictures, but sadly didn't bring my cord to upload my pictures to Tara's laptop and she doesn't have any cords that are compatible with my camera. Frown face. She knows someone who has the same camera that I do though, so we may try to borrow that from her.

So yesterday Tara and G and I went to the 10,000 Buddhas monastery. The good news here is that Tara already has some pictures from there, so just pretend I took these pictures. Anyway, you hike up this really steep paved trail to get to the top and I pushed G in his stroller and there are times where the trail slopes by at least a 60 degree angle. G is not a small child. I got a workout.

The trail is lined with life size golden buddha statues and each one is different. At the top is the monastery and a building that is lined with tiny buddhas from floor to ceiling. Oh, and lots of burning incense. Here's a little bit of what's at the top.

And here's a view of the city from the top:

And here was the most harrowing part of the trip:

I know the monkeys look nice. And actually, one of them appears to be playing with himself, but the monkeys yesterday were an angry mob. We were heading down the trail and an army of monkeys appeared. At first it was kind of cute and fun until one of the monkeys bared his teeth and hissed and charged at this guy that was by us. And then it seemed like monkeys started to appear in the trees all around us. Tara actually screamed and scared the guy who got charged more than I think the charging monkey actually did. Anyway, we opted to hold off on heading down the trail until the angry monkey army dispersed. I had visions of Planet of the Apes and the Wizard of Oz and any other movie with creepy monkeys.

We went to Snoopy's World at the mall afterwards to decompress and then met up with Owen and then headed home. After dinner, Owen and I went over into China in search of a cheap tailored suit. We found his girl, Rosie, and she is going to hook us up. China China was definitely different than Hong Kong China. A smellier, dirtier and more persistent version. People really wanted me to buy watches and DVD's and t-shirts and stuff.

A couple funny things of note. I keep running into things. I think maybe because everything is so much smaller and more compact and I expect to have more room than I do and I just run into things. Or maybe I'm just clumsy. Yeah, that could be it too.

Also, I think the crosswalks are funny. There's a noise that tells you when it's ok to cross the street and it sounds like a Geiger counter. When your time to cross is almost up, the clicking noises are more rapid, thus appearing to signal the presence of a lot of radiation. It makes crossing the street kind of fun. Like pretending you are escaping nuclear fallout.