Feeding the Gods

Taoist temple on my first trip to Asia – Hong Kong. Hard to imagine that we were a bit nervous, language, culture, what if we couldn’t cope? We needed a ‘safe’ place to start… Hell – that was my husband, not me… I had plans to do a lot of travel in Asia and I knew he would love it too, if he could get over his fear of the unknown.

So we started with Hong Kong. Five days on the tail end of a month in Europe, knocking off a few of the big rocks there… We arrived in a typhoon, heavy, slow storming, air as hot and dense as a sauna. Assaulted by advertising everywhere, blinking, flashing, swirling, signs, screens, billboards, monitors, hawkers, vendors, neon neon neon. No sky unless you looked straight up. It was more than a little overwhelming at first, especially since all that colour, glitter and glare made all the streets look the same, so it was hard to get our bearings.

But of course we persevered. And if we never quite got a handle on where we were, and wavered between the melting temps of the street versus the super-coolness of our hotel room (which also housed a large coterie of local prostitutes who were ever so entertaining at breakfast), we rather fell for the place. This is the Man Mo Temple, one of the oldest in the city. Imagine this 100-fold, the air so dense with incense you can’t quite see or breathe, but its heavy quiet was an escape from the bustle of the street. A wonder. And I knew my husband was going to want to come back for more…

Dream job

This was taken at a Buddhist Temple in Penang.

Utterly delightful – the daydreaming Buddha and the young disciple spending his days bathing him. Very mind-clearing, calming. Something so pleasingly simple about it.

Simple seems so very pleasing at the moment. Not that my life is all that complicated, but it occurs to me that perhaps I make it more complicated than it needs to be…

Holy Books

I’ve always liked the feel of holy books – they have a particular weight, gravity embracing, if you will. These were sitting on a table in a temple in Penang.