Saturday, July 18, 2009

What country am I in again?


GeoTagged, [S25.82457, W28.73401]

Trevor and I were driving from Pretoria to nelspruit and we spotted some pagodas from the highway. We drove towards it and found the Nan Hua Temple, an exact replica of the temple in Taiwan. I spoke to a monk inside ( who knew the first time I'd speak Chinese in like 2 years would be in Africa??) and it turns out this is the Fo Guang Shan temple for all of southern Africa! There's also an African Buddhist seminary here so I was very surprised to hear Africans speaking Chinese!! From what I understood, there are some changes they've made to localize the temple. The biggest one I saw was that the buddhas carved out of wood had black skin, which I thought was cool. Anyway, the monk said he came here 4 years ago from taiwan and much prefers the weather here since it rains so much less!! Crazy thing, globalization.

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