fixings for a great weekend in China

Breakfast of champions!! Homemade banana pancakes, chinese strawberry jam, banana & home-grated cinnamon compote, honey! oh and wine, cuz we were out of potable water that morning. Be flexible is, after all, peace corps' moto.

Afterwards, we hiked a mountain and explored two buddhist temples there before finding a beautiful windswept cemetary of sorts at the top.

At the first temple we heard chanting but it was largely deserted, with a brisk fall wind whipping the curtains back and forth before the altars.

Here the older men and women who were sitting around the doorways told us they were students, of Buddhism I suppose, & they flocked around us to the altar and pressed fruits into our hands. One man followed us into another building and carefully showed us how to perform the prostrations correctly after we lit incense.



At the top we found brambles and a thin trodden-dirt path edging the rim.
Gravestones and markers were scattered haphazardly,

terraced steppes cut into the landscape around us,

and just below the edge of the far slope,
we found fall.