A few weekends ago some friends and I checked out some random Chinese cities a bit south of Beijing. Well, I thought they were random but they did, in fact, have some cool stuff. I had been in Beijing a week and was already dragged (willingly) along on what was going to be a 48 hour adventure. But it wasn’t quite that simple.
Early morning in Louyang
After a quick overnight train from Beijing we arrived in Luoyang. It turned out friends of friends of friends showed up too so there were 18 of us weiguorens – foreigners. Yeah… First we checked out the Longmen Grottoes. The UNESCO World Heritage Site has thousands of caves, many of which have Buddhas carved inside them. Most of the awesome carvings have been destroyed. Heads are missing on most, a result, no doubt, of China’s Cultural Revolution.
This guy survived the Cultural Revolution. His friends over his shoulder weren't so lucky.
We checked out some Temple place that I forget the significance of. Must not have been that important. Then we hopped a bus to the small city of Dengfeng. For dinner we ate on the street. Not only did that mean cheap beer but awesome grub. Sitting under a small tent we ate off boiled sticks of tofu, pig’s blood (dark, dark red clotted squares on a stick), meat balls, and… we’ll that all I remember exactly. There were lots of vegetables and other stuff. Good fried noodles too. We washed it all down with some shots of Beijiu.
Did you know kung fu started at the Shaolin Monastery in China? I didn’t, so it was especially cool to see where the martial art was established. A hefty entry fee and commercialized kung fu show were less than spectacular. What was cool was the monastery itself and the cable car to the top of some mountains near by. Cool looking rocks there.
This is when the fun started. We had to make it to the small city (7.3 million people) of Zhengzhou to catch our train back to Beijing. We realized we were a little short on time so we made it quickly back to Dengfeng to find a bus to Zhengzhou.
