Today we visited a Children’s Village, where they aim to take care of children whose parents went to jail. There are around sixty children who live there between the ages of three and twenty. They go to school during the weekdays, but we got to visit them since we went on a Saturday. We brought them small gifts, including pencils and candy, and then we had time to play with them. First we played basketball and taught them the game knockout. I then played a game I had never seen before. It consists of kicking an object back and forth, similar to hacky sack, but they use a pole with weights on it instead of a ball. Some of the children knew some English, but they were pretty shy about talking to us. Me and Robert spoke a little bit of Chinese to one of the younger boys, and then he told us some of the words he knew in English. It was nice to get to know the children, and see that even if you are not fluent in a language, you can still communicate and make friends.

After our visit to the Children’s Village we went to the Greater Wide Goose Pagoda. This is a very tall building which served to store many books which were translated to Chinese, and therefore acted almost like a library. Recently, the building started to lean, so they had to remove all of the books to prevent it from collapsing. We got to see many ornate statues of Buddha, and then got to sit in on a calligraphy class. We learned a few characters, their meanings, and how they have changed shape over time.