Bye Luoyang

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I'm in a new city now! 9 hours later on a train... today we went to the longman grottoes, which were countless carved in caves with buddhas of varying sizes, from tiny to monstrous can hardly get into a picture. it was very neat, but pretty crowded. we also went to the White Horse temple; the first buddhist temple in china. again, interesting but crowded. it was weird to see a monk in real life; im not sure what i was expecting but they were friendly. Tomorrow we're going to see a kong fu show, and the Shaolin temple then driving to somewhere else to take a plane to the next city.

the food in this region is a million times more to my liking; a lot less greasy. i'm fairly sure my teeth will rot out from all the soda i'm drinking (no diet here) with dinner. it's nice to be excited about meals instead of secretly eating my slim fast meal bars. Apparently the food in Lhasa, Tibet is all yak, which I am just waiting with bated breath to try... (GAG!!)

I don't really have anything super exciting to say, it's just been a lot of traveling other than those two hot spots. I've had a lot of neat fruit lately I wish I could identify and buy in the States. There were turtles in the supermarket aisle the other day 😞 How sad!!

Something I don't think I've mentioned is how hard it is not to give money to beggars or bottle collectors. Everyone drinks bottled water & many people collect the bottles. I thought this was great, instead of them begging... until one of our guides told us it takes 100 bottles to get 1 yuan. Thats.. pitiful. We saw many men carrying huge sacks over their shoulders down the mountain (that Amanda & I were struggling to walk down/up normally) the other day... and it was heartbreaking. Seeing poverty mixed in with luxury isnt something I've had to confront on a daily basis before, and it's tough.

So I don't leave on a debbie downer note.... here is a funny story I don't think I've typed out. We've haphazardly been trying to speak some chinese, and apparently on one of the family visits a while back, Bill, an older, very fun gentleman on the trip, tried to compliment a man on his furniture. The furniture was hand crafted, and as the man looked on Bill smiled and said something pronounced "mama hoo hoo!" the translator wigged out & told him that this didn't mean "good, great!" as he thought but rather " mediocre... i've seen better". This poor old man reportedly looked like he'd been slapped in the face!! Apologies were made but.. how funny. Hopefully this translates into text even though it's much better when he told it. On my language path, the hand signals here are different for 1-10! This explains the confusion among shopkeepers when we were trying to pay. Even little things are not universal.

Well, until I find internet again........... adios!

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