more of the temple fair. As you can see there are a ton of people and red is the most predominant color. This is what the area with the vendors looks like. You can see a white mask in the lower middle, these were some feather masks that seemed to be pretty popular. Lots of people like wearing masks to the fair so i guess my request for costumes is almost complete, i just need to convince everyone to start wearing full costumes instead of just masks.

this was the altar part of the temple. The layout was a garden square area where most of the vendors were then the altar area then the actual temple. As you can see it is a bunch of raised squares which makes it recognizable as the earth temple, the sky temple (tian ton) uses circles. Or at least that is what hua said. From what i remember of the forbidden city squares seemed pretty common in the temple areas in there. So i would not go preaching the square / circle method of determine temples as gospel to others (even though i kind of am by mentioning it here :)


the maze of terror was near the kids section but i was too frightened to go any nearer than this, terror indeed. The kids area was pretty cool. It was also the only area you could escape the press of people. They had an ice pond where little kids got a sled that they laid down on and scooted all over the ice and a fishing pond where you could catch plastic flowers that flowed around the pond. Min from the dinner the night before actually busted her shoulder on the ice pond when she went out to get her kid. They were at a different park though so we did not witness the busting of the shoulder. It does show though that a lot of this stuff was to be found at most of the temples and the parks.


basketball == huge. This was another one of those commonalities, the same games for the most part. Ring toss, ball in a can, darts into balloons, basketball... . The most staggering differences would not come until later.


this is were you could light incense to carry with you to the altar to pray. This was another difference, fire standards are not as stringent. You have a ton of people walking around with incense sticks that have turned into de facto torches. One good thing is that the incense sticks don't really smell like anything so i suppose they should be called punk sticks or something similar but incense seems to have stuck. Also you can see the old man staring at me in this picture, that is pretty common as well. It is not that noticeable walking around but as soon as i stop to talk on the phone or take a picture and get a chance to watch people watching me i notice it a lot.