Hangzhou - the road to your inner self

Hangzhou left me with an amazing feeling of belonging to another world. Everything here is so far away from everything I knew in Europe. The people, the food, the lake, the religion, the flavors, the scents that blew me away and wanting to taste everything and explore more and more.

I visited the city and its surrounding in August and I must say that here I experienced the highest temperature and humidity in my life. It was therefore mandatory to rent a bike and do the tour of the West Lake which is quite big with beautiful scenarios to be seen.





I was first impressed by the huge plantations of Lotus Flowers. Apparently the Lotus flower loves the hot humid climate of the area, therefore you could see large portions of the river covered up by lotus. It was more interesting for me as I saw that people were collecting the seeds of the lotus flower once they were faded away, and sold it on the streets. I don't know if it's edible, but I assumed so, as there were many people selling or buying them.






The lake has an amazing vegetation, which I usually saw only in botanical gardens. Huge plants, flowers, bamboos trees and even frogs and turtles. When riding along the lake, a necessary stop would be the LINGYIN TEMPLE,  a Buddhist temps which is located in the Wulin Mountain near the West Lake. The translated name of the Temple would be: "Temple of the Soul's Retreat", which is quite exactly how you feel when you travel up there: like you retreat your soul in a quiet and calm place.

In order to reach the temple one has to make the journey on foot, passing by statues of the Laughing Buddha sculpted inside the rocks of the Wulin Mountains. The temple has different levels, each level containing several halls:

• • - Hall of the Heavenly Kings
  • - Grand Hall of the Great Sage
  • - Hall of the Medicine Buddha
  • - Sutra Library
  • - Huayan Hall
  • - Hall of the Five Hundred Arhats

When you reach the top of the temple you can see amazing gold Buddhas and beautiful decorations.

The thing that most impressed me was the traditional Buddhist ceremony which I discovered when entering one of the halls of the temple. The singing, the ritual, the smell of the burned scent were things that kept me hypnotized, looking as a small child at this whole ceremony of peace and serenity.







You can find the rest of the story and images on my blog:

littlepleasureoflife.blogspot.…