Blogs from Henan, China, Asia - page 18

AS you probably understand already - Shaolin temple is where the Kung fu (martial art) was born - and yes, it is kung and not kong... To arrive there we enjoyed a new fast luxtury train from Beijing (5h) and 2 hours bus which brought us to a nearby town (Denfeng). since we had not much inforamation on this town we had to spend the night in a bit expensive hotel and decide to stay there one more night... The temple area was full of tourists and we saw a Kung Fu show again, but this time we also saw a Kung Fu monk throwing a steal niddle throug a glass (making a hole in it) and blowing a baloon which stoond behind it! The more impressive site was the Kung Fu school (the biggest) ... read more

'Laowai, laowai!' Sometimes you can just catch the words being whispered by one adult to another, and sometimes it gets screamed by an excited toddler to their parents. The rough translation is, 'foreigner', but it probably has more of an effect like, 'alien'. Though not strictly an insult, it is often used in a derogatory sense - a bit like 'gringo' in South America. I hadn't heard it until I hit Luoyang. Since then I've had it about twenty times, and my responses have ranged from a cheerful wave to a barely-concealed snarl, depending on my mood and tolerance levels. The reason I heard it so much in Luoyang was because I was the only laowai there, or at least I was the only one I was aware of. And that's hardly surprising: Luoyang doesn't have ... read more

Day 180, 27th November Zhengzhou - Xinzheng This morning, we all felt somewhat better after our illnesses and agreed to set off at eleven, but I think that I was still feeling the worse, though. I don’t know what we had had, food poisoning, a virus, or just a bad flu? It was an overcast and cold day as we cycled out of Zhengzhou and its ugly suburbs. The place had a strange feeling of totalitarianism to it and I was glad to be leaving. We’d seen children practicing military marching drills with workers in the streets, and we saw the biggest thing ever carried on an ordinary bike: a three-seater sofa! Just out of the city I began to feel rough and very sick. My legs were so weak and I could hardly manage 7mph ... read more

Day 175, 22nd November Handan - Anyang - Tangyin Woke up to a polluted haze of fumes and assorted chemicals - the worse yet. You could hardly see the other end of the field we’d camped in. I was suffering from a kind of a cold too, along with the rest of the other guys. This rough feeling, and cycling through the soup of fumes made for an awful day. In Anyang, I bought some flu remedy which looked very dodgy, so I did’nt take it. The fumes got thicker and thicker as we rode south. III dread to think what will happen to this place if the Chinese try to emulate the west and all buy cars - it would be hell on earth! It would even affect the whole of the world’s environment. It ... read more

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, was the setting for Star Wars....Apologies for this blog entry, I have just watched the pirated version of Episode III here, as almost everything in China that's American intellectual property is a copy. Two and a half billion years ago, when the earth was still in its infancy, a small mountain range in central China jutted into the sky.....One thousand five hundred years ago, this mountain range became the birthplace of Kung-fu and Zen Buddhism.....The mountain is Song. The temple is Shaolin... Song Mountain is the central mountain of the League of the Five Swords, one of the holy Daoist Peaks. The Shaolin Temple of Song is the central Shaolin Temple in China, the one that spread Kung-fu to many parts of the world and ... read more