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Published: April 6th 2012
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Once again I was glad I had the hotel name in Chinese and the phone number to our hotel Christian's Hotel. The cab driver had to call the hotel to get directions. Once we arrived we were greeted and brought orange drinks and hot towels to wash our hands and face. We arrived in Luoyang a day early so we had to try to explain that we needed to book a room for tonight as well as for the next day which we already had booked. This was more difficult than we thought since not many people in this city speak english. There was one man behind the desk who spoke a little and he ended up helping us figure it out. Once we saw the room we were really excited. It was huge and the beds were really comfortable. We were hungry since we hadn't eaten dinner so we went back to the front desk to see if anything was still open, we had already walked around the mall that the hotel was attached to and everything was closed. The english speaking man told us to get into the hotel van and someone drove us to a noodle restaurant and
then came in and helped us get food. This was hard because the driver didn't speak english and neither did any of the employees. He ordered bowls of noodles in a broth for us and we had pointed to some meat in the counter which they brought over and we put in the noodles. Luckily I could understand numbers in Chinese and were able to pay our bill which amounted to about $7.50 for both of us including a Tsingtao which I had to point at behind the counter to get with all of the staff standing around trying to hear me talk.
I can't say enough good things about this hotel. They provided unlimited free bottle water, fresh washed fruit and a computer in the room. This morning we got up and booked a car to take us to Shaolin. Then we had a free breakfast in their restaurant. It was a buffet with Chinese, American and European breakfast food. When the driver came to pick us up to go to Shaolin the staff rushed out with lanyards that held a bottle of water so we could wear them around our necks. They just went above
and beyond what they needed to do.
The drive to Shaolin was a little over an hour. The houses we saw were very bare and a lot of them had clotheslines full of drying silk in all different colors. I wasn't sure what to expect from Shaolin but it was impressive once we were there. We toured all of the areas and liked the pagoda forest the best since we had never seen anything like it. We kept walking up the street through Shaolin and found that they had two different chairlifts up the mountain. We took one of the chairlifts to the top of Mount Song. The chairlift took about half an hour to reach the top. We hiked along the path around the mountain for an hour or so. The back side of the mountain is very sheer. The path was sometimes bridges attached to the face of the mountain. We loved this walk and wished we had time to go farther but we had to start making our way back to our driver. Shaolin is so spread out that it took a good half hour to walk from the chairlift to the entrance of
Shaolin. When we were leaving the kids practicing were just going out to their practice field, there were hundreds of them all different ages. We were so exhausted when we got back to the car. Back in Luoyang we went to dinner at Pizza Hut, which is completely different from the Pizza Huts in the US. This was like a Italian restaurant with pizza on the side. It has appetizers like snails and squid. We were exhausted from all the walking the last three days and the flights so we went to bed early.
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