Strolling down the streets of Beijing can have different flavors depending on the District you're walking around. Then there are some streets that might give you a nice surprise depending on the time of day you visit them, as they have a considerably different look in the daytime than they do in the nighttime. Ghost Street is a case in point.

Walk around Ghost Street (in Chinese 簋街) during the day and there's hardly anything happening. But walk around it at night and it's a totally different ballgame: A few dozen restaurants lined up on both sides of the street, lanterns lit up above the sidewalks, improvised sidewalk stands selling all kinds of things, guys luring pedestrians into their restaurants, restaurants full of customers, many people walking down the street, etc. I even found a Russian restaurant there.

Definitely, Ghost Street deserves to be visited at night more than once.

The Lama Temple, on the other hand, is a daytime-only place to go to, and it doesn't have any bustling going around within it. I've read it's one of the biggest and most important Buddhist Temples in the world.

But of all the things I saw there, the icons and effigies of different sizes they have inside the different temples were the most impressive. Unfortunately, they didn't allow any pictures taken indoors, so I was unable to show any of that in the album shown below.

China may have plenty of shortcomings regarding a few aspects of its daily life, its general culture and its politics, but it also has plenty of things worth contemplating regarding its ancient traditions and history.

To view larger versions of the photos just click on any of them and keep clicking "next".