After our late arrival last night & our love of sleep in's, its no real surprise that today was a late start & a convenient McDonalds breakfast.
We then set out for a walk through town, to locate a printing place, a supermarket, a bank and to see the Dai Temple.
We were unsuccessful in finding a place to print out our documents, lucky our next hostel has the facilities. We came across the Dai Temple, found at the Southern foot of Mt Taishan, a place where ancient emperors came to worship the god of Mt Taishan. The temple has palace-style architecture with double edge eaves, ancient trees, corner towers, numerous prayer halls, incense, wishing wells & is housed behind 8 gates. We only walked through a small section of the temple, taking a few photos, enough to appreciate the god of Mt Taishan.
After the temple we walked down the main street, trying to withdraw some cash, failing at a few banks until we found one big enough to accept a foreign card. then it was on to the supermarket to buy snacks for tomorrows adventure & a few beers for tonight while chilling in the hostel common room.
The city of Tai' an, feels like most other cities in China. Along the main street there is a lot of traffic, it is scooter mayhem on the sidewalks & carparks! There are a lot of big fancy department stores, banks and we noticed a lot of shops with big glass front displays for wedding dresses and wedding photography. In the smaller streets, the cement pavement is very old and crumbling away, people gather on small, fold out chairs to play card games or stand around chatting. The stores here are smaller clothing stores, shoe stores & the usual amount of street food. We saw quite a few people walking dogs.
The city is smothered in a thick haze of air pollution, we haven't seen it this bad since we left Hong Kong, only the haze in this city feels closer to the ground and was noticeably uncomfortable. We didn't stay out for too long.
That night for dinner we conveniently walked 2 streets away to 'food street' where we both had 2 giant meals. The cost for each meal was $2.10 AUD, by far our cheapest meal! We then got ice cream, I selected a purple one thinking it would be some sort of berry..... We are not sure what it was but it tasted like prawns!
- Alli
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