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Published: April 25th 2010
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Man squatting and picking his nose in the middle of the Beijing Train Station...only in ChinaWe left for the trip the day after our finals, Saturday night. We got on an overnight train from Beijing to Luoyang. The train was not as nice as the train we took last semester from Beijing to Xi’an. It was the same set up with six beds together then a wall, but unlike the Xi’an train, there was no wall between the beds and the hallway, so it was really just a big open area. We talked to some very nice people, which seems like a common occurrence on trains in China. I slept well and was ready to start my trip when we arrived in Luoyang early the next morning.
First we went to the Shaolin Temple, which is the home of a very famous martial arts school. Kids are brought to the school to intensely study martial arts. We saw a show and they were very impressive, just like those crazy kungfu movies. One kid even broke two metal bars over his head. There was also some interesting scenery. They had a thing called the forest of towers, it is trees and stone towers mingled together to make a really cool hillside. I climbed up a tree
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Shaolin Temple to get a good picture from higher up, which I also enjoyed because climbing trees in Beijing isn’t really possible. They also had a pretty cool temple, but we came at the busiest time of the year so it was crazy. Now is the time the Peony flower blooms, and Luoyang is very famous for their Peony flowers so they have a Peony flower festival. For that reason it is a very popular tourist destination during April and the entrance to the temple was out of control. I have a picture of the line, but no pictures of the fights that broke out as people were pushing to get into a temple…oh China, when will you learn to stand in line and complain like Westerners instead of squishing everyone until they start a fight?
After Shaolin Temple we went to the White Horse Temple. For the most part, just another temple, but there were a lot of flowers and it has a pretty cool story. I ended up hanging out with the tour guide during this temple. She only spoke Chinese so she didn’t bother giving a group explanation since most people wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t be able to
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Zoey, didn't want her picture taken understand if she gave the tour like she would to a Chinese group, but since it was just us two she explained things to me in more detail. It was really cool to hear some things about the temple and practice my Chinese. The tour guide was only 20, she told me the high school she went to was for becoming a tour guide, so at the tourist sites she knew most of the other tour guides because they were classmates, and they probably see each other every day while they are touring the sites of Luoyang.
That night we ate one of the delicious meals that the program provides for us where they stuff us full of great food. This meal was particularly spicy so I really enjoyed it. After the meal, Orit, Lauren and I asked some locals where we should go to hang out and they told us how to take a bus to a night snack street. We had to ask some people on the bus but we found what we were looking for. Next to the snack street there was a big plaza area with people dancing. One group was dancing the Yangge, and
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Kind of awkward picture but I like it, Katie Mike and Andrew one group was doing ballroom dancing. We walked through the dancers and everyone stared at us, we definitely weren’t in Beijing anymore. We were standing at the end of the plaza when an old man came up to us. We were expecting him to speak Chinese, but he spoke English to us. It wasn’t very good pronunciation, but we were all speechless. He is the first gray-haired Chinese man that has spoken a word of English to me, and he could actually speak decent sentences.
We talked to the man for a while and ended up being surrounded by a group of curious people, four of which were kids. I started talking to the kids and they were very interested in me. There were two cute little twin girls (that's one way to stick it to the one child policy), a funny little boy, and a quiet girl in middle school. The boy kept asking me about famous Americans, but they were all the Chinese names so I didn’t know who he was talking about, but I did understand Michael Jackson, so he thought that was funny. He asked who my role-model was, I only know a slim number
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Line to get into the temple of famous people’s Chinese names, so I told him Obama, and he was very amused, but said that was an okay choice. While I was talking to the kids, Orit ended up going to dance with the old man. We all had a lot of fun talking to people who basically treated us like celebrities; I guess they don’t get many foreigners, and definitely not a lot who speak Chinese. We also walked down the snack street waving and greeting all the people who stared at us, so that was fun. We didn’t eat anything too out of the ordinary because we were stuffed, but it was a lot of fun.
The next morning we had a lecture about Luoyang. Being a group from the best school in China has its perks, the man who spoke to us was the dean at the culture University in Luoyang. He was obviously very knowledgeable and had a lot of interesting things to say. He spoke in Chinese and our program director translated for us. I could understand most of his Chinese because like most educated people, he spoke relatively clearly. I learned that the Chinese word used to signify Buddhist temples
was originally used to show that a place was supported by the government. He said that may be one of the reasons Buddhism became so popular in China. I also learned that the peony flowers are more than just pretty. They were planted in families’ courtyards to repel mosquitoes. They also are used to make some very unique food in Luoyang. Later that day I tried a type of sweet snack made from the Peony, it was weird, but not bad.
After the lecture we had a big group lunch and then headed out for the Longmen Grottoes. All the people we had talked to the night before said Longmen was the prettiest place in Luoyang, and they were right. I have pictures, but it was kind of foggy so the pictures don’t do it justice, it was really beautiful. Especially as a Minnesota boy, it’s great to be out of the big city for a couple weeks. Longmen Grottoes is on a river and it is a whole mountainside with Buddha shrines carved into it. I hung out with the tour guide and two friends who have also been here all year, and are both better at Chinese
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Tower Forest than me (Mack and Elizabeth), so I had to step up and speak Chinese pretty much the whole time. I think the tour guide had a lot of fun because she didn’t have to seriously give us a tour, more just hang out and share a little of her knowledge. We also got her to climb a couple paths up the mountain where she had never gone, even though she goes to Longmen almost every day. Before we left, Wenjing (our tourguide) bought us some hard candy snacks they were making right outside of the shops.
That night a few of us went looking for a small place to eat dinner. We found a pretty small, not very clearly marked place with a bunch of people eating there and figured that was a good bet for some real good Luoyang food. We were right because the noodles we got were something I’ve never tried before, they had a more creamy sauce which I’ve never had in China but it was great. They also had soda pop in glass bottles that was made right in Luoyang. They had both lime and orange flavored soda, it was one kuai per bottle,
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Pretty cool which is like 14 cents American. We got a few bottles of that and some Chinese rice liquor for 5 kuai (less than a dollar) and mixed them, considering how bad the rice liquor usually is, the drink tasted pretty good. We didn’t stay there for very long but we did make friends with the boss, she was very nice. I went to buy another bottle of soda and she didn’t want my money anymore, I still paid since it was only 14 cents, but it was a cute sentiment. The whole time we were there the waitresses were staring at us, if we waved or said hello they would giggle and run back in the back room, we obviously weren’t in Beijing anymore.
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Carol (Grandma)
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Thanks
Hi Jacob, Thanks for the blog on your trip. Sounds like fun and I love the pictures of you and your friends and also the one of the flower, I am guessing it is a tree blossom. Save that one, it is 1566. I would love a copy of it when you get home. Will read your next blog. Haven't been in my email for awhile.