Meeting Adam
Slugged down some water and took a few unbecoming shots of the foggy panorama below. Not much to write home about.
A young guy called Adam, because he’d spent some time studying in the U.S., came over and asked in commanding English if he could have some conversation.
“Sure.”
We got chatting. He’s from Changsha and with a friend of his who didn’t talk much, if at all, while he couldn’t stop, and went into the depressing rudimentaries about today’s China, how everything’s been overtaken by money (the world over) unless your extremely unfortunate to be very poor and not to be trapped by the prison of greed. The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protestors haven’t worked out how they are going to change or overturn human nature which has lasted since man became man, and greed, and the puruit of power, no less. What’s happening to this little planet may be unprecedented but not the banality of the human condition.
We didn’t linger around.
“Would you like to stop at a Taoist Temple? There’s one on the way down. I don’t adhere to the religion, whereas a lot of Chinese do.”
“Sure.” The stop-by was short-lived, as we had to offer a fee to visit the confines. “It’s against my principle,” thinking religion is something inward or invisible, not something outwardly physical represented in the architecture, however eloquent, of some building.
It was the same when we reached a Buddhdist temple further down, although the trough-like urns were messily covered in the insense ash from the incessantly burned sticks from endless devotees. And no less in the piles of it that looked quite comical.
“We are passing through the grounds of Hunan University,” Adam announced as we reached the level bottom and the gate to the park.
He may have been cynical about contemporary China, but not about its communist foundation. “We will reach a big statue of our great leader very soon.”
Mesmorizing about Chairman Mao is as strong as ever in untold millions of Chinese represented in one solitary individual.
We parted company on the bus back into the city.

I alighted at Taiping, strolled back to the hostel, and crashed on my bed as the guy above had done.
So much for Yue Shan, or is it Yue Lu? I’ll never know.