Hong Kong, Day 3 (redux)

Today we repeated our tour from Thursday except today we were joined by the other families in our travel group. Hooray! It makes this all feel so real and so close and it’s nice to be with other people who have shared this long painful wait. On Monday, we’ll share amazing moments as we meet our daughters for the first time.

We were guided by our CCAI host in Hong Kong (Matthew) who is wonderful. Today he shared many facts about Hong Kong with us; tomorrow he will chaperone us all the way to Guangzhou.

In the afternoon we visited the Temple of 10,000 Buddhas which is a Buddhist Monastery that houses at least 10,000 Buddhas. It is a beautiful place on the side of a mountain with glorious views of the city and well, at least 10,000 Buddhas. My favorite was at the very top over a waterfall. We climbed a lot of steps. I think someone told us 286 but Brian thinks someone told us 400, probably somewhere in between and it felt like 10,000.

On the way down, we passed a Monk. He stopped and bowed. We stopped and bowed back. He smiled and laughed and then put prayer beads on my wrist, blessed them and bowed. Then he took prayer beads off of his wrist, put them on Brian’s wrist, blessed them and shared a bow with Brian (their heads almost bumped). Then he asked for $100 donation (about $15 US – which is not bad for a set of blessed beads from a mountain top Monastery). We did not have enough cash so Brian gave him everything he had and I put my beads back in his hands. At the bottom of the stairs I remembered that I had some cash too but I’m letting that go and remembering the special blessing.