China Day 9 - Xining

Added: September 08, 2009

I could not sleep well, so when Rich opened door on our coupe around 7:00 on Tuesday 14th of July I was tired and surprised. He told us that we are stepping off the train in 1 hour. Conductor informed him incorrectly before and our train will arrive 4 hours ahead of original plan. Surprise!

When I look outside I can see we are slowly getting into Xining. We can see old decaying apartment buildings around. That means we slept over Quinghai lake shortly before Xining (at least we hopped it will be visible from train).

Because of surprise arrival our bus is not at the station yet, so I have time to look around train station. I can see big mosque-like building with the shops at the ground level and Eiffel Tower nearby. Our impression about the city made in train did not changed. We do not like Xining.

Another disadvantage of unplanned arrival is that our hotel rooms are not ready yet. We are waiting in lounge for about an hour. At about 10am our room is clean and available. I am impressed. Getting the room so soon in the morning is nice.

Kumbum Monastery

We are visiting Kumbum Monastery afternoon. It is less than hour from our hotel.

Kumbum Monastery was founded at place where Tsongkhapa, founder of Yellow Hat sect, was born, so it is very important in Tibetan Buddhism.

It is quite big, but so many tourists were there it was very hard to take unobstructed view. Combination with cloudy sky leads to unsatisfying photos (for me). While I am not happy with photos there are many attractions there to see. We liked a lot wonderful yak butter sculptures created by monks and 3D mandala - puzzle leading to enlightenment. I guess it is not easy to pass :-)

And for cheap chuckle they provide a nice piece of Chenglish in one of temples: "Kindly refrain smoking to take photo." Unfortunately I cannot prove it, because I refrained smoking :-)

DSC_5684_raw