Lama Temple and dumpling making

On our sixth day in China we decided to head to Lama temple with Rebecca, an American who just arrived in China the day before.  Lama temple is officially known as Yonghe temple and is the largest and most important Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the world (so says wikipedia).

We did not burn film inside the building, but only because they said not to.

 This buddha is 18 meters tall!

We spent a good hour or two walking around the temple before heading out to get lunch.  We ended up eating at a food court at the first restaurant that offered us food (a guy showed us a bowl of plastic vegetables with an egg or a bowl of plastic meat, we choose the vegetables).  It was incredibly good, partially because we were starving.

Since the pollution had cleared that day we decided to head to the hill overlooking the Forbidden city.  It was quite a climb up the hill but worth the effort.  We had a clear 360 degree view of Beijing.

Back at the hostel, they were offering dumpling making and hot pot for dinner.  Making dumplings was a lot of fun, rolling the dough out into little flat discs (the trick is to make the disc a little thicker in the center than the edges), then stuffing them with either pork or egg and shaping them to look like a dumpling (the hard part).

All the dumplings were eaten (although not as good as traditional dumplings) and then hot pot was set up.  Hot pot is where there is a pot full of boiling flavored broth and meat and vegetables are put in the pot to be cooked then fished out and eaten.  It was a fun night sitting around the hostel with a group of people making and eating dinner.