As I mentioned before the subway system in Beijing is extremely easy to navigate. The layout makes sense (I’m looking at you Boston) and all the stops have their English-written names below the Chinese characters.

In order to get to my hostel by subway I almost always had to transfer to line 5 at the Lama Temple stop. After being in the city for a few days and using the subway every day I got curious as to what this ‘Lama Temple’ was and decided to check it out for myself.

The Lama Temple is a temple and monastery that serves as a residence for a large number of Tibetan Buddhist monks from Mongolia and Tibet, and therefore became the national center of Lama administration.

When I got to the ‘Lama Temple’ stop on the subway I was looking at a map trying to figure out which exit to leave the station from - pretty much every subway station has exits A through D and most of the time they don’t tell you what is located outside each exit.

A young woman around my age came up to the map about the same time as me and I asked her if she was looking for the temple as well. She told me she was and we decided to find the place together. She was from Spain and in China for work for about a month and, having just come up from Shanghai the day before, decided to do a bit of sightseeing.

We made our way to the temple, paid our 25 RMB entrance fee ($4 USD), picked up our free incense, and stopped at the fire to light the incense and pay our respects.

Now we lit a few sticks of incense at the beginning of the temple and then left the rest behind once we entered (we both wondered why they gave us a huge bundle when there were signs that said to only burn 3 at a time).

Well we quickly found out that inside every single building there were places to light incense and pay respects to Buddha. Every single building. And there were probably at least 30 buildings. That’s a lot of incense.

And we missed out on all the subsequent incense fun. Oops.

The Lama Temple was a bit like a smaller version of the Forbidden City in that once you thought you’d gotten to the end there was yet another building beyond that one and it never seemed to end…and always smelled like incense.

As you went through the temple from building to building the statues of Buddha got larger and larger. Until finally you made it to the 26 meter high statue that holds the Guiness World Book of Records as being the largest Buddha to be carved out of a single white sandalwood tree. Seriously impressive.

Unfortunately right before I got to the big Buddha I lost my Spanish temple buddy somewhere in the crowds of people and we never found each other again. Such is the short, sweet life of a travel friendship.

The temple was a beautiful and peaceful place to be in an otherwise hectic city and a fun location to people watch. There were people silently praying, others not so silently, monks walking around talking on their cell phones and others having seemingly deep philosophical discussions. But everyone knew it was a place of worship to be respected.

Did I mention it was beautiful?

Have you ever been to a temple in a foreign country? What was your favorite?