Beijing photo walk

I love my DSLR. I wish I could use it better and own a wide-angle lens for touristy photography, but still, I absolutely love my camera.

And luckily I found a photo-walk group in Beijing. It is just a group of cool people who like taking pictures, and get together to walk around and take some pictures. And the Beijing group is pretty awesome. I only went on one of the events due to time/travel issues but that day I met people from France, Canada, UK, US, China and a couple of other countries that I am forgetting. They were expats, people with short-term projects in China, students etc. It was a fun group of budding (and some pro) photographers.

I skipped going to one of the temples but was able to go to the mosque - Niu Jie and Fayuan Si (Temple of the Origin of the Dharma), which is the oldest Buddhist temple in Beijing. I was prepared for another Chinese mosque after being to the one at Xi'an. It looked pretty similar in Chinese architecture as with other temples.

And it being China, every tourist attraction has to be accompanied with a silly, confusing but completely amusing sign. This one was green !

However, this being a photo-walk, goal was to get some out of the ordinary pictures. I think I did well with the grill behind a grill (reminds me of dream within a dream from Inception)

And I happened to like the lines created by the construction material lying in one of the mosque corners.

The temple was more colorful and had an air of liveliness to it. There was a giant fish, fake flowers put in plants and super sharp talons on the momma lion.

In China, it is common to see two lions at the entrance. One of them is the momma lion playing with its cub and the other is a male lion with a ball. However, at Fayuan Si, both the lions had sharp claws. No one knew the answer as to why, but the cracked ball looked ominous compared to the other versions I have seen.

Lion on left looks much less menacing...

Hopefully I can find a photo-walk group in Atlanta but I doubt it would be as diverse as the one from Beijing !