Another day in Guangzhou

This post has been created from an email since access to the blog is still blocked in China.

Yes, I'm still A Prisoner of China, but am well and healthy and almost stupidly happy and cheerful. I'm holding Smiling Buddha responsible for the latter. Just a quick word to him about lightening my heart and voila!

I'm impressed.

Actually, that's what I've been doing all day; "God bothering", as my dad used to call it! Remember how impressed I was that Kwan Yin at Three Big Buddha Temple answered Halley's prayer in under three hours? Well, that raised the bar and set the standard so I went off today to offer puja to that same Kwan Yin, Goddess of Mercy, to ask her to get my luggage back. After trying out my appalling Cantonese for "Three Big Buddha Temple", the taxi driver took me to ...

Six Banyan Temple

... which turns out to also have three giant Buddhas, so we kinda communicated a little bit ...

three giant Buddhas
You have to notice the monk before
you have an idea of the scale.

... but this 1400 year old temple - which I will be blogging about once I return to HK - fingers crossed - was so OK I decided it would do ...

... but here's something really weird: the moment after I prayed to their Kwan Yin ...

Kwan Yin

... I began feeling right guilty, wondering what Father Branfield would say, but then realising he'd only laugh which just made me feel worse ... so went off on another brutally hot midday hunt for a Christian church, and eventually found Shi Shi Cathedral ...

aka Sacred Heart

...and there made a similar plea to Mary ...

... and then wandered around the apses and knaves, past all the praying Africans ...

These guys pray in French
and stretch out their arms
and really get into it.

photographing this amazing Gothic structure ... ... because I'm planning to blog that too.

Astonishingly beautiful windows.

Oh, and wandering around I started to remember bits of Catechism class run by those ghastly nuns and recalled that St Anthony was the saint you prayed to whenever you wanted to recover lost stuff, but, because I had no idea what St Anthony looked like, I selected a saint who I didn't recognise and asked him to get me my stolen belongings back ... and then, just in case it wasn't St Anthony, I found St Joseph ...... who I recalled is the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, and if this isn't a lost cause I don't know what is, and asked him to take an interest.

So that's the request: Belongings back today! I prayed to Kwan Yin at noon, and Mary at two pm, the Saint-who-may-be-Anthony half an hour later, and St Joseph about 10 minutes after that, and since the standard is set at three hours, we will now see which of these does it.

Call me irrational, but let's see what happens before we declare me completely off-the-scale insane!


P.S. Oh, and I now have it on good authority that my blog is blocked in China and was told the reason. Remember how I posted that item over a week ago on the Mothers of Tianaxxxxxx (fill in the xs yourself)? Since authorities in China are obviously googling the net for this stuff, let's get it wrong, but June 5th (a day earlier) will be the 20th Anniversary of The Event that Must Not Be Named, and China is desperately sensitive at the moment.