Walking past the graveyard
This must have been "Weekend de los muertos" or something. Everywhere we turned we saw tombstones. Or I suppose they might be called sepulchres. I don't know. I'm too lazy to do a google search. Anyway, one thing we discovered on our hikes is that there are plenty of tombs on the local hills. Rather large granite things, about six foot high, maybe three feet wide and.... oh, I don't know how long. Five, six feet, maybe? The things are on a hillside and I've never been inclined to walk around one. The fronts generally have a little alcove in which is placed a plaque with Chinese characters. All I've been able to decipher are dates. Anyway, I think I've read that cremation is the preferred form of disposal around here, so I'm guessing that behind the plaque (or the bricks, as shown in the photo) are the ashes of the dearly departed. The things looked vaguely familiar, even though I've never seen their like in a U.S. cemetery. It finally occurred to me that they resemble my old Apple monitor that I had bought with my Mac IIci. When I had this epiphany, I immediately instructed my family that should I die here, I want them to get me one of these Chinese tombs and have a little Apple logo carved into the corner.
Now, we've passed by a few graves on some of our mountain hikes here. It might be one or two, or even a dozen. Just a handful of graves clumped together. There didn't seem to be much organization to it. Apparently, folks just buy a bit of the mountain from the government and set up their grave. So, this weekend, with everybody out of town, we did a family hike and decided to explore a new trail. We headed up Ba Shan and after a few dead ends, started heading up the hill. Well, soon we came up to a grave, and then there was another... and another. It seemed like everybody and his brother were planted here. We discovered, we thought, the popular burial site. But the views were pretty good, so there was no cause to complain.
The next day, Yau Neih and I set out for our Sunday "exploring". We've fallen into the habit of investigating some of the sections of town we don't frequent. I decided that I wanted to follow a particular road that had some sort of landmark at the end. You see, we have a map of the city and I've deciphered some of the symbols. I can tell where the church, shrines and temples are located (the mosque didn't make it onto the map for some reason), but there was one symbol--a little rectangle on a base--that I couldn't place. I was thinking it was some monument or something. So anyway, we went off to investigate. It was a pleasant walk, albeit uphill for a good part of the way. Eventually we came across a place where folks were carving away at granite blocks. An interesting sight. We walked a bit further and found a couple more "granite shops". There was also a tomb being assembled. We thought we must have found the carver section of town. Then we circled a corner and could see a little pagoda peeking over a stone wall. I figured that this was our destination. As we got closer, it turned out that the top of the hill was essentially the city graveyard. The road curved around the walled off area. (We didn't try to enter, but the few glimpses we got looked nice) On the other side of the road were all sorts of tombs interspersed with trees. It was like all these stone structures hiding amongst the forest. There was also a section behind a chain link fence that had more Western-style tombstones. We reached the end of the pavement and were treated to a beautiful view of a valley and distant hills. To the west, the neighboring hill was covered with tombs like an Eastside housing development. There was quite a strange beauty to it all. And of course, it was something that I was unable to capture on film. (Or pixels, as the case may be.)
After that we turned back and headed home, another mystery solved and another place that invited further investigation.
posted by John @ 7:44 AM
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