Luoyang

After a week of final papers, Chinese exams, and recovering from late nights and our very full day in Datong, it was time to pack our bags and prepare to leave Beijing. I packed my whole room, moved the suitcases into a designated hotel room and took my backpacker’s backpack and my laptop and boarded a train with 24 other people in my program. We were beginning a two week long trip that stops in Luoyang, Xi’an, Chengdu, Guiling, Yangshou, and Long Sheng.

I am, as we speak, on a train from Luoyang to Xi’an, recounting my exploits in our first city. Luoyang was very interesting, and as I mentioned in my entry about Datong, it was the second capital of the Northern Wei Dynasty after they left Datong. The first place we visited was the Shaolin Temple, the place were Kung Fu originated. Kung Fu is much more interesting than I every imagined, and I have learned a lot more about it since I came to China. The martial arts form began as an effort of the Shaolin monks to counteract the hours upon hours they spent in meditation with meditative exercises. They would study the way animals moved when trying to defend themselves or stalking prey, and they would spend hours hopping around like frogs or trying to imitate the way a leopard sprints on all fours. Watching the monks do some of their moves, it’s easy to see some of the animalistic origins of their movements.

These activities force them to be extremely flexible, and they are just as creative and talented as the acrobats I saw with my mom. They train for twenty years to achieve proficiency in Kung Fu, and they strengthen their body by punching hundreds of pieces of paper glued together on a wall. Eventually, the paper wears away, and they punch the wall. You can see people who are training in Kung Fu hitting their heads repeatedly against walls and trees. The end result is that they can break steel blades and pieces of metal with their foreheads. We got a chance to watch the Shaolin Monks perform some of their coolest feats.

Wandering the grounds of the Shaolin Temple, we saw a huge flock of white birds, and my friend Richie and I both bought some bird feed. The birds climbed all over us, trying to get the food we had, and at one point I had five white birds on my arms. It was crazy!

The one thing I was hoping to see but did not get to was Drunken Boxing. The monks get one monk drunk and study how the monk reacts to an aggressor. Because he is already a very good fighter, his reactions are still generally successful at avoiding the blows of the aggressor, but he is loose and more flexible. The monks study the movements and try to imitate them, and the end result is that they are able to fight sober fighters by avoiding each punch or stab by fluidly moving their bodies, bending at weird angles, and avoiding the hard, jerking movements of how they would move as a sober fighter. I saw Jet Li do it once, and I thought it was pretty cool.

However, for my brother, I picked up some weapons so that he can stop going back to the Asian Wonders store, which is a store that apparently sells Asian martial arts weapons but sounds like a brothel and totally irks me. I did try out the weapons on some of my friends, and an all out battle ensued.

The next place we visited was the White Horse Temple. This is one of the first Buddhist temples in China, and is still an active place of worship. The monks there adhere to a very simple life, and spend most of their days in worship and monitoring guests, though I swear I saw one of them talking on a cell phone. The temple complex is beautiful, and the monks grow exquisite flower gardens and fields of crops for self sustainment. I made friends with a few of them when I bought a purse (I didn’t bring one with me on the trip) and was able to answer their questions about Beijing in Chinese.

Our next day in Luoyang, we visited the Longmen Grottoes, which is a bigger version of the Yungang grottoes in Datong. The caves were very similar, mainly because they were built by the same people, just in a different location. We weren’t allowed to enter these caves, and we could only take pictures of the large sandstone Buddhas from outside fences, but I snuck over one fence and pretended to be a Buddha successfully, without getting in trouble. While I was more impressed with Datong’s caves, the location of the Longmen Grottoes was really beautiful, with the Yi River running past the caves and more greenery and gardens in the area. We spent three hours wandering the grounds, exploring the caves, and visiting a temple.

That afternoon, in search of something to do, a group of us headed over to a park we could all see from our hotel windows. We could see a Ferris Wheel there, and we decided it was worth a visit. The park turned out to be a zoo and an amusement park rolled into one. We all got into bumper cars and spent the next fifteen minutes ramming into each other. Then Heidi, Jon, Aaron, and Richie had a go-cart race, and Gill, me, Aaron, Jay, Georgette, and Cara rode a Chinese roller coaster. This roller coaster went upside down twice, was incredibly rickety, and my seat restraint that came down over my shoulders wouldn’t stay down by itself; the attendant wrapped a seat belt through the middle and fastened it to me. But I survived, and I get to say I rode a roller coaster in China.

The other part of the park was very upsetting. Lions and tigers paced back and forth in their tiny iron cages with no hope of proper care or exercise. The animals are poorly treated and have no where near enough room to move around or really do anything. Hundreds of birds are crammed into aviary cages, and grizzly and black bears loll around in small cages with filthy, polluted water. It reminds me that China has no animal rights policies except pertaining to Great Pandas, and the animals in China, whether they are domestic or wild, are treated with great disrespect and neglect.

That night we decided we’d like to all stay in and relax, and a group of five set out to get pizza from Pizza Hut armed with everyone’s money. We ordered four pizzas, and went out to wait outside for the pizzas to be made. The hostess came rushing out to tell us something, and Molly and I leaned in to hear what she was trying to tell us. She didn’t speak very much English, and Molly and I couldn’t really understand what she was telling us, but we were starting to believe she was saying that Pizza Hut had run out of pizzas. She kept pointing to our four different pizzas and telling us we could only have two. Meanwhile, a beggar decided that while we were arguing with the hostess and freaking out about the idea of Pizza Hut running out of pizzas, this would be an appropriate time to come over, push aside the hostess, and shake his bowl at us. Then, a woman walked by into McDonalds next door with a whole dead chicken. Finally the hostess gave up and showed us the picture of a stuffed crust pizza, and then told us we could only have two. She only meant that Pizza Hut had run out of the cheese used for stuffed crust, and we would have to get two stuffed crust and two normal pizzas. Whew, what a crazy 15 minutes of confusion and weirdness.