“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.” Spontaneous Beijing

Why am I writing so often these days? Because I am enjoying some holiday:-). Today I followed the budhist saying "The way is not in the sky, the way is in the heart", looked at a Beijing map and decided to drive to Fayuansi, a buddhist temple not mentioned in my Beijing guidebook. My intuition was right: under a wonderful blue sky I visited this treasure of old buddha statues (some extraordinary ones like a wooden reclining buddha of 7.4 m), quiet courtyards and eager buddhists reciting buddha's words (some quite fast which made it sound a little bit like rap). Next to the temple was an old hutong which automatically made me want to enter and that's what I did. I followed the hutong lanes passing old houses, old men and women sitting on the street talking or playing Chinese chess, greeting me followed by the usual "hen gao, hen gao" (so tall - referring to my height) muttering. In some part of the hutong the wrecking ball ('Abrissbirne') showed signs of its presence and I wondered once more if that was a good or bad thing or maybe a combination of the two.

At the end of the hutong the atmosphere of the quarter changed: I had entered the biggest Muslim quarter of Beijing. Men wearing hats and long beards, women wearing a headscarf or in rare cases even a burqa mingled with Han Chinese. A small market sold muslim pastries... and I also found one or two mosques. One of them (called Niu Jie, Ox / Cow Street, existent since 996 AD) was open for visits and reminded me a lot of the Xi'an mosque which also has a distinctive Chinese style to it. What a 松快 day!