China Flashback - "New" Video

I haven't edited any more of the video from our trip to China in several months. I keep meaning to do this but have been really short on round tuits lately.

I have one sequence I finished back when I was working on this and have finally uploaded it to "Hui-Hui's World". It's of our day trip to Longxing Si in the old city of Shijaizhuang. We were really impressed with this temple. It is quite old and has a couple of very impressive images of Guan Yin Pusa. I have some friends who are anthropology/archeology buffs that I think will really find this clip interesting.

I'm posting this one now because I have been reading China adoption travel blogs again and feeling nostalgic for our trip. It was all of six months ago. I love the driving sequence in this video because it has Hui-Hui in Tina's lap (no carseats in China) and he is really starting to show his cuddly playful nature (this was his 3rd full day with us) and in the background you can see the semi-rural countryside of China rolling by.

Clicking on this picture will take you to our video page
then click Shijaizhuang Temple Visit

A few notes on the music I used for this video: The first track is from a disc of contemporary music featuring the Hulusi, or Chinese gourd flute. Our guide "Bob" played this disc for us in his car and loaned it to me so I could make a copy. The music I used for the temple sequence is from a CD we got at the Six Banyan Temple in Guangzhou. We were very interested in the Buddhist practices in China which really seemed to please our guide Connie. I know there are adoptive families who use their China trip as an opportunity to evangelize Christianity. I think the guides probably bear the brunt of many of these efforts as they have quite a bit of "face time" with us adoptive families, but I felt this was our opportunity to learn about their lives and faith. Because our visit to the Six Banyan Temple was our second temple visit, I think (or hope) we didn't appear to be quite such bumbling novices regarding the practice of lighting incense, etc. Connie asked if we were Buddhist. I told her no, but said we were quite interested in the faith. She explained that she was, and that her family regularly came to this temple for festivals. She then took us over to a table that had free literature and scriptures. She gave us a number of small books (in Chinese) and the CD with the track I used for part of the temple sequence. The part with the monks playing for the man praying is actually live music we caught with the camcorder.