归元寺 – Guiyuan Temple

We went sightseeing today! Wuhan doesn’t have as much to offer within sightseeing as bigger cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but it has a few places I would like to visit while I’m here. Today our plan was to first visit Guiyuan Temple and then the Yellow Crane Tower. Unfortunately we set off a bit too late to see both on this fine Saturday, but that didn’t really matter. We are here for a whole year so we will have many chances to see the Tower on a later occasion.

We have just made ourselves familiar with the Wuhan Metro, so we decided to stick with what we know rather than mixing the bus schedule into this as well. Getting from Huashi* to the Temple isn’t difficult, it just takes some time. First we walked to Jiedaokou Metro station, took Line 2 to Xunlimen, switched to Line 1 and went to Qiaokou. Then, since the Metro station is a bit too far from the Temple to walk, we took a taxi.

Luckily the temple wasn’t too crowded today! I was expecting more people but we were lucky, no queue so we paid our 10元 and entered the area. Guiyuan Temple was built in 1658 and is really just like any other Buddhist Temple. It has notable Chinese style buildings, chanting monks, burning incense and statues of Buddha. Nevertheless, visiting temples makes a nice day out wherever you are in China.

It was boiling hot today so after walking around for a bit we decided to sit down and have a cool drink. Suddenly a Chinese man joins us and said he wanted to make friends with us. We spoke to him for maybe 10 minutes in Chinese and English. He was a policeman, liked going to the gym and he’s originally from Wuhan. He was patient when we tried to speak Chinese and we taught him how to say Beckham. This is what I love about China. Wherever you go people are curious about you because you are a foreigner. If you are ever in China and someone comes up to you don’t be too alarmed. They just want to practice their English and wonder why you are visiting their country. We were also stopped by some women who wanted to have their picture taken with us.

After visiting the Temple we walked around the neighborhood for a bit, ate Japanese ramen and then took a taxi back to Huashi. In the taxi we crossed the first bridge that ever opened across the Yangtze River and we saw the Yellow Crane Tower overlooking the city. Will definitely go see the bridge and the Tower soon!

*Huazhong Shifan Daxue (Huazhong Normal University)