Rainy days and decisions

It rained here yesterday. Not a light drizzle, but pouring down, cats and dogs rain. We advised out guide that we did not want to go to the summer palace in this weather. Our initial thought was that we woud take the day off from touring, but she would have none of that. Wendy suggested that we switch our schedule around and visit the Lama Temple, our Friday tour, and hope for better weather for the Summer Palace tomorrow. Her reasoning was that the Lama Temple was an indoor tour. She also wanted us to visit the railway museum, but we nixed that. The children are a bit overscheduled and needed a down day. Yesterday with the Great Wall, the two craft factories and the acrobats was a long day filled mornng to night. She didn't seem happy with us, but oh well.

The Lama Temple is quite beautiful. I am tring to remember all that she told me. Originally a prince lived there - he was the son of the Emporer and lived there during his father's reign and when he ascended to the throne he moved to the Forbidden City. The residence was then used for a visit from the Dalai Lama of Tibet and afterward was made into a temple. It was another tongue biting tour. It was hard to hear her talk about the relationship between the emporer and the Dalai Lama and show us an enormous, 26 meter high Buddah statue that was made in Tibet as a gift for the emporer's 60th birthday from the Dalai Lama. How do you fit this in your brain with the treatment of the current Dalai Lama? How does this pride of this temple fit with China's treatment of the Tibetan people? Complicated questions.

After the temple we returned to the hotel. We had a long talk about what we wanted to do abut the Olympics. At this point most of the events we truely wanted to see are over. We missed our chance to see the final days of gymnastics. Divinig was obviously a disaster. We are recluctant to spend the money for more tickets and have the children melting down again. We discussed buying the cheapest tickets we could find to whatever event it was just to get back into the village and see some more of what is there, including the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit. The boys have seen the warriors on tv and wanted to see them this trip, but their original location is far from Beijing and we couldn't fit a fourth province into our trip. Bill went out yesterday and tried to find some tickets in our price range for this plan and failed. It looks like our olympics are over. I am extremely disappointed abut this and had a good cry over it while the children played with their Nintendo ds in the other room. I have a love hate relationship with those little things (the games, not the kids.)