Dream Destination: China, pt. 3

Welcome back, and get ready for part three of the grand China adventure of Summer 2017.  In case you haven't read them or feel like revisiting, here are links to part 1 and part 2.

This post covers week four of the trip.

Here we go, back to...

Xi'an, Northern China

After our second week of excavation, my friends and I took a trip to Xi'an on our break day.

We were headed to Dayanta, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda.  Dayanta is the building depicted at right, behind the traveler, in this subway station mural.

*Funny anecdote: I got crushed in the doors of the subway because the trains run so fast that they wait for no one.  An employee shoved me inside, leaving me with lines of subway door grease down my arms and legs.  I was not injured, and it was honestly pretty funny because we had just noticed a sign that said "Warning: Crushing".*

Beautiful terra cotta brick pillars outside the entrance to Dayanta.

Peaceful, enlightened buddhas.

Fountain shaped like a book!  Peep Dayanta in the background.

Another view of one of the multiple imposing pillars.

John and I in front of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda!

This beautiful relief of Buddha with attendants and others, Dayanta in back.

Happy little Buddhist.

Approaching the pagoda...

We purchased incense at the entrance to burn at the various stations around the pagoda and temple.



John got this photo of the inside of the main hall.  Central figure is Sakyamuni Buddha, the historical buddha of the sixth century BCE.  I spent a long time in here, including a very spiritual experience with a lot of crying and abounding gratitude.  It was here, my first time in a Buddhist temple in China, that I knew I was home.  

The pagoda in its full glory.

We got to climb the seven stories of the inside of the pagoda.  There were windows on the north, south, east, and west walls of the pagoda, so we could see out in all directions from every floor.

More floors up...

Awesome view.

The stairs in the pagoda were nothing if not claustrophobia-inducing toward the top.

A little house for Buddhist relics inside the pagoda.

My malas.  I purchased the leftmost one at Dayanta, after climbing the pagoda in silence.  I still wear this every day.  Rightmost was purchased at Huashan, middle is from Los Angeles Chinatown.

John got this super cool Guanyin statue.  Her thousand arms and eyes are meant to symbolize her helping all beings; fitting for the Bodhisattva (like a saint in Christianity) of compassion.

I adored this sign along the path by the pagoda.  "Please protect the grass and trees, for then they will always be able to share their life with you."

Little structure outside the main pagoda.

On this day, to these nuns, I spoke my first full Chinese sentence, and for the first time officially declared myself a Buddhist.  "Wo shi fojiaotu." 我是佛教徒.  In response, they took my head in their hands and said, "May Buddha bless you." (translated to me by my friend).  They then happily offered to take a photo with me.  To this date, one of the most profound experiences of my life.

On our way out, I snapped this photo of the main pagoda hall.  It is still the lock screen background on my phone today.  (Can you tell this day meant a lot to me?)

Something super funny: for lunch, we went to Pizza Hut!  In China, Pizza Hut is a sit-down restaurant; it's actually quite fancy in there.  Look how tiny the slices are!

Selfie showing my new small jade Buddha outdoor market purchase (top) with my Muslim market Guanyin pendant below.  I wear the top Buddha every day, still, although the string is now fixed.

The subway cards had such cool designs on them.  The way the system works is, once you get off the train, you have to give your ticket to a machine to leave the station.  We got a photo of them so that we could remember what they looked like.

On the way back, we stopped at the Muslim market (of course!) to shop for gifts.

My favorite Muslim market snack: mixed dried fruit... majorly lusting for this.

Also crucial: peach drink, pocky, and a very cool Mao Zedong quote book I purchased as a gift for my dad.

 Gifts for friends and family!  The Muslim market was the perfect place to shop, as they have seemingly endless stalls of vendors with great souvenirs and local goods.

The next four days, we finished up our excavation work at the archaeological field site.

In a very funny twist of fate, while digging in our trench we unearthed a plastic bag with Neolithic 

(5,000 year-old) pottery inside.  Lo and behold, it was from our field school in seasons past!  This indicated to us that we were still in a "contaminated" layer, meaning we were not yet excavating at untouched depths.

Lunch at our favorite spot.  Spicy tofu, egg and tomato, and delicious vegetables all around.

Look at this writhing maggot we found!!  We thought he was perhaps a baby centipede.  I was going around the site showing everybody because I thought he was great, but others were not so enthused.

Final lunch at the best place.

The owners and cooks at our lunch place of choice!  They took photos of us on our first day there, so it was only fitting that we got photos with them on our last day.

Me and Mi taking final elevations in our trench.

Our group on the last excavation day.  I miss you all, tanfang san (trench three)!

Me at the bottom of our ever-deep trench.  Man do I miss this.

The pick-axe was one of my favorite tools!  We used a technique called "gentle pick-axing" that I greatly enjoyed.

John and I in full badass-archaeologist stance.  Here I am holding a hand spade (shǒu-chǎn 手铲), my favorite and most frequently used tool.

Such a fantastic group.  MISSING EVERY ONE OF YOU!

Another shot of all of us.  This was taken on a different day, but you can hardly tell because most of us wore the same excavation clothes throughout.  (Don't worry - they got frequent washes in the sink!)

After leaving the site for the last time, our field station treated us to a delicious lunch of homemade dumplings.  For me and John, they made egg and chive ones!

We then returned our bikes.  Hot, sad day.

The next day, we gave our full presentations on the field dig.  In the night, the Shaanxi Institute directors held a special dinner for everyone.  It was Andrew's birthday, so he got a special crown and song!  Fellow in the striped shirt to the left is my good friend and pen-pal, Nierongyi.  We met this night and have communicated over Wechat (Chinese messaging app) ever since!

A peak into my little journal in which I practiced my Chinese.  I am so glad that I incessantly asked for my friends to translate and teach me words; I ended up learning quite a lot!

And now, the documentation of the field school has come to an end.

At this point, Faith and I had a weekend before she flew home to the US.  We decided to book a hostel in Xi'an and explore more of the huge city!

Faith next to my bunk bed.

We excitedly ventured out into parts of Xi'an we had not yet seen.

Artists, jewelers, and vendors of all sorts lined the streets near our hostel.

The inside of a beautiful antique store.

We stayed in a hostel nestled up next to the Xi'an city wall.  This is the moat that surrounds the wall, built for fortification over 1,000 years ago when Chang'an (Xi'an) was the capital of China.

The wall standing today is a refurbished version, though still built about 600 years ago.

Green water of the moat, city wall, and these lion-dog guards.

The main gate!  This drawbridge would have allowed the city within to close off and protect itself from invaders.

The gate and moat below.

Incredible, historic place.  Dynasties have risen and fallen, and this wall remains.

My art on the hostel wall.  Character in pink says "lotus."  If you notice my signature - 若仙 - this is my name in Chinese, given to me by the Shaanxi University director of our field school at a special dinner early in the program.  It means "like an enlightened person," literally "like a mountain person."  It is pronounced ruo-xian (close to "Roxann").  This was the first place I signed my name like this, and now I sign all of my art with this signature.

You'll never guess where Faith and I went for dinner...

Yes, you got it - the Muslim market!!  Look at this stick of fried crabs.  These were VERY difficult to eat.

Sticky flower cake at left, long curly potato chip stick (for lack of a better term, ha ha) at right!

We then tried this frozen dessert made from some magical mixture of sugar, ice, and nitrogen (I'm guessing??).  It is like dry ice, it evaporates right from solid into vapor!

It feels like you are breathing out cool smoke while you eat this!

Fried quail eggs.  I LOVE these.

They let you choose from many different sauces, including a tomato sauce, a spicy sauce, and a pepper sauce.

Fish eating my feet!?  Yes, indeed.  Faith and I decided to try the treatment where fish feed on dead skin cells on your feet and toes.  It sounds gross, but it was actually so cool.  It felt freaky at first but I ended up loving it!  They also had free tea and wi-fi.  We stayed here with our feet in those tanks for an hour.

Such sweet creatures.

Inside one of the bigger shops at the market.

Fried quail egg bread.  I was definitely on a quail egg kick that night, and I am proud of it!  This bread was sooo good.

Fruit!

When I was in Cancun four months prior, I met a wonderful friend named Zach.  At that time, we found out that Zach's dad works in Xi'an, and that Zach would perhaps be returning to China around the end of my field school.  Fast forward to July: the most divine timing brought Zach and I to the same part of the world again!  Zach and I traveled around north/central China together for the next eight days.

So, the day before Faith was heading home to the States, Zach, Faith and I went to Famen Temple, west of Xi'an.

Are we surprised to see this drink in my hand?  I think I would develop diabetes if I lived in China full-time and drank this as much as I did while visiting.

Famensi, or Famen Temple, was first build in the 500s CE.  The architecture has been updated since; the diamond-shaped building at left was only completed in 2009.

The temple is famous for housing highly sought-after relics of the historical Buddha's, including his finger bone.

One of the temple buildings in the complex in front of the pagoda.

The pagoda is 50 meters tall, or about 15 stories.  It is called the "True Relic Pagoda."  Visitors were not allowed inside.

Staring directly up the side of the pagoda was dizzying to say the least.

View of the temple complex from the other side.

The older part of the site, including this pagoda and the surrounding temples, was devastated by heavy rains in the 1980s.  The pagoda itself actually collapsed as a consequence of the natural disaster.  This resulted in the rebuilding of the pagoda, and the unearthing of myriad Buddhist treasures and relics that are now housed in new buildings like a museum and an astounding stupa.

This is the "Namaste Dagoba," the tallest Buddhist stupa in the world at an astounding 150 m (35 stories!) tall.  This was built in 2009 to house the relic of the Buddha's finger.  It is hard to tell from this photo, but the stupa is actually quite far away here.

Along the huge path leading from the older pagoda and temples to the new stupa, monumental golden depictions of bodhisattvas line the way.

Here we have Suryaprabha Bodhisattva, goddess of the sun.

This is Avalokitesvara, or Guanyin, the most prominent Bodhisattva in the Mahayana Buddhist belief system.  Avalokitesvara is actually the original, male form of this entity; in the transition from India to China, he took on a female form, Guanyin.  She is the goddess of compassion.

The stupa as we got closer.  Gorgeous floral arrangements, statuary, and water features greet the visitor as she approaches the monument.

I did not take any photos inside the stupa out of respect for the practitioners within.  We fortunately happened to arrive in the brief window of time during the day that the relic of the Buddha's finger rose up from its underground chamber to be on display to devotees.  When we entered the stupa, we were surrounded by uniform chanting, everyone uniting in the incredible experience of witnessing something we deem so sacred.  This was such a special moment.

Dripping lotus candles directly in front of the stupa building.

A plaque in the nearby garden.  परिनिर्वाण: "Parinirvana" in Sanskrit.  Translation: the final death of the Buddha, when he entered complete and full nirvana and left this earth.

It began to pour on us as we drove away from Famensi!  Thank you, monsoon season, for making driving in China even scarier than it already was.

For lunch, Zach took us to a favorite spot of his.  This restaurant specializes in a style of noodle bowl called "one bite," where the bowl is very small and the server stays by your table to keep refilling it.

The idea with this special technique is that each bowl will have everything in it in perfect proportion, so each bite is perfect.

The kind server.  The noodles and vegetables are on the tray and in the bowls behind her.  After putting the solid ingredients in the bowl first, she adds in the broth.

In all honesty, these noodles were pretty darn delicious.

The next morning, the sun shone brightly on Xi'an by the city wall.

Faith and I had a traditional Xi'an breakfast of Roujiamo 肉夹馍, which technically translates to "meat sandwich," although ours were egg rather than pork.  Yes, that flaky bun was as good as it looks.

This brings to a close week four of my China adventure.  Stay tuned for week five - by far, my favorite week of my life thus far.

Infinite love and light to all!