Tianhou Temple

One Saturday Ron and I took a taxi to two different temples. The first is the Tianhou Temple (a Daoist temple) , the temple with the longest history in Qingdao. It was first built in the Ming Dynasty in 1467 A.D. It has a stage in the front and bell and drum towers on both sides.
It is now used as the Qingdao Folk Customs Museum. There were many artifacts inside the museum, but none of the words were in English, so it did not take us long to look through the museum!
The first three pictures were taken inside the musuem. The wood carvings are made of a tree root and the bottom part of the trunk.







The large sticks in the following photo are incense, which are sold to people who want to light them. There are all sizes of incense sticks---I guess it depends on how much money one wishes to spend, how much help one needs,..... or maybe on how high one wants the smoke to go!






Following are some photos of some of the images to which people were bowing down. There were old people as well as young people bowing down to them. It was really a sad sight........










When Ron and I arrived at the temple, we saw a large group of university-age students that were evidently on a bus tour. Later Ron and I sat down on a low wall to rest and have a drink. We noticed that some of the students were looking at us, and finally a couple of them came over and asked if they could take their pictures with us. We agreed, and before we knew it, more and more of the students came over to have their pictures taken with us. There were 30-40 pictures taken! We must be celebraties!....or maybe the students were just not used to seeing old, grey-haired Americans!