The Final Trip

Before leaving China, Jia and I took a final trip to Guangzhou--primarily to pick up our plane tickets. We had planned to stay the night and attend Web Wednesday to help promote Terracotta Typewriter, but that got canceled.

After we got our tickets, which took far longer than expected, we headed over to Guangxiao Temple. Jia decided it was important for her to visit a Buddhist temple before our flight to New York, and I was interested in seeing it again. My first trip outside Shenzhen was to Guangzhou on New Year's Day--and Guangxiao Temple was on our list of sites to visit.

I remember being impressed with the almost 1700-year-old temple on the first visit. I wasn't so impressed the last time. For one thing, I've seen plenty of temples (you might say I'm templed-out), and this one didn't have any features that really stood out. Also, Guangxiao was going through renovations this time around, and much of it was closed off--I couldn't even find the really nice turtle pond.We headed to lunch at Danny's rather late where we met up with some Twitter friends, @JohnInGZ and @JWKirkland and his brother. As Jia and I sat longer with JohnInGZ, Danny showed up to talk with us--and time just flew by. Before we knew it, the restaurant had closed for the afternoon and was almost ready to re-open for dinner.

We parted ways with our friends and walked around Tianhe district for a while before heading to the bus station to catch our ride back to Shenzhen.