Marion's Miscellaneous Musings

Back to religion again.

We also visited the Wenwu Daoist (or Taoist) temple, on the shore of Sun Moon Lake. It was totally different than the Buddhist monstery. It was guarded by a pair of lions; the colors are bright red, green, blue and yellow, but mostly red; There were lots of prayer flags and incense.

A pair of lions guard not only the temples but many public buildings in China. We were asked which one was male and which one was female. There was a ball under one and a small animal under the other. I finally guessed that the male gets to play (with the ball) while the female works (takes care of the baby), and I was right!

There are many ways to worship in Taoism. As our guide put it, the complicated thing about praying is understanding God's answers. So there are machines and pulling sticks from a barrel and fortune telling and astrology...all of them with suitably vague answers.

This is also where we sampled some tea. The teapot probably holds about 2 cups of water. You fill it about 1/5 full of tea, pour the water in, let it steep for 1 minute, pour the water out, refill, and steep one minute more. Pour (through a strainer) into your cup. The first minute gets all the bitterness out. The expanded tea leaves competely filled the little pot! They like their tea weak, so why Starbucks is popular I don't know! But the tea was very good. We also acquired enough knowledge to be dangerous. Handpicked tea is better than machine picked. Mountain grown is better than valley grown. Taiwan's best tea was way to expensive to be sampled. I bought handpicked mountain grown tea for NT$800 (a little over US$25) for 8 ounces. I passed up handpicked high mountain oolong for about twice that. And, of course, I discovered both at 2/3 the price at a Saturday market! But I was running short of cash and at least the temple took credit cards!

posted by Marion @ 7:56 PM