Luoyang to Dengfeng (a.k.a. everything I do is an adventure)

The day started out innocently enough.

I had my usual breakfast at the hotel (it was bustling this morning) and then I packed up for my trip to Dengfeng.  I had some free time so I decided to splurge for another 30 RMB latte.  I was wondering why I was so beat yesterday and I realized it was my first day coffee free!  I'd been planning to wean myself off of coffee for this trip, so I decided to count the experiment as a success and get back on my coffee habit.  The barrista (I don't know the Chinese term for barrista, and I'm not even sure the English spelling is correct) was excited to find out that I was learning Chinese, and gave me a book to read while I waited for my "na tie".  It was something like a children's encyclopedia of China, with lots of pictures.  (He gave me a big explanation, but I only caught every third word.)  Anyways I posted a pic of the cafe a couple of days ago but here it is again:

Who wouldn't want to spend a relaxing morning n here sipping on a "na tie"?  The women back in Victoria will be excited to hear that they were playing Leonard Cohen!

I didn't take any pics of the bus station or bus, but if you've ever taken the bus anywhere in the world imagine a scene bigger and more chaotic.  The bus seats were small even for the locals, so imagine me jammed into one for over 4 hours!  The bus trip was only an hour and a half, but they boarded me an hour early (the schedule is the schedule but the buses leave when they're full!) and then we got caught in the biggest traffic jam in China outside of the Shaulin Monestary.  (By the way everyone thought I should be going to the Shaulin Monestary.  The ticket lady tried to sell me a ticket for "shau lin si" but I had to argue "bu shi, deng feng" and then the bus conductor tried to make be get off at the monestary.  Do I look like a tourist or something?)  Here are a couple of pics of the "du che":

I think this stretched all the way to Deng Feng, about 10 km.  When I visit the monestary I may just walk, it will be quicker!  It was very hot on the bus and everyone was falling asleep:

Awww ... kind of reminds me of my seatmate on the train trip to Luoyang.

Here is my first view of Dengfeng:

Beautiful, eh?  I'm glad I'm here for 6 days.  I plan to do a lot of sleeping and relaxing, mixed in with a little bit of hiking.  I figure I can get all the hardcore touristing out of the way in a day or 2.

My adventure started after I got off the bus.  I grabbed a taxi to my hotel (actually hostel) and the driver took me to the wrong place - a scenic park outside of town.  "Is this the right place?"  I asked just about everybody, and they all said sure, sure, so I bought a ticket and went into the park.  After all, why wouldn't "Dengfeng Climb International Youth Hostel" be inside a park?

Well it wasn't.

Once I realized this I found the nearest place with tables and shelter and food so I could sit and rest.  And eat.  "我快饿死了！" (I'm starving!)  I chatted with some of the locals, and they had a good laugh at my adventure.  I bought some food and water (it was delicious!) and made my way to the park exit where I grabbed a massively overpriced cab to my hostel.  It was about 2 blocks, I could have walked in 10 minutes.

Anyways I got my room and now I'm sitting in the lounge with a beer.  Does it not look nice?  I love China!

Tomorrow I'm going to chill, wander about town and maybe to the park where I found myself stranded today.

PS Here's a picture of the park across the street from my hostel:

And here's where I had dinner tonight:

It works on the "card system" - you buy a card with 100 RMB (of course immediately they deduct 10 RMB for the card, way to go China) and then you shop around each of the vendors around the square.  If you order their dish they zap 15 or 20 RMB off your card and someone delivers the dish to your table.  Check out the last pic, to the right, how they serve pitchers here!

龙门石窟 (Pics as promised)

Here are some pics of yesterday's visit to the Longmen Grotto.  I hired a guide so I found out that:

The Buddhist statues and caves in the grotto were all carved out of the rock of the hills.  The larger caves took up to 30 years to complete, and the monks had to apprentice for up to 7-8 years before they were qualified to do this work.  The caves were sponsored by various individuals, the size and complexity relative to the amount the individuals were able to sponsor.  The largest Buddha is over 7 meters tall (the ears are each 1.9 m long) and the smallest only 2 cm.  The "10 thousand Buddha cave" actually contains statues of 15,000 Buddhas.

Here is my tour guide Lily (a.k.a. 董丽媛 - dong li yuan).  She went to university in Xi'An and has been working as a guide for about 5 years.

Of course the most popular exhibit in he place was me.  About 15-20 people asked to take their picture with me, and a few others took my pic on the sly.  Here is a young girl from Inner Mongolia, I never got her name.  She is studying in Xi'An but taking a break to do some travelling.  She is visiting Luoyang for the Peony festival, as the Peony is the national flower of Mongolia.  We wandered around and chatted for about 20 minutes, I think she was excited to practice her English.

She told me that Inner Mongolia is so flat you can drive with your eyes closed and not hit anything.  I said we have parts of Canada like that!

龙门石窟 (The Longmen Grottos)

Yesterday I took the city bus up to the Longmen Grottos, a collection of caves with Buddhist sculptures, about 8 km south of Luoyang.  (Yes I was the only foreigner on the bus.)  When I got there I hired a guide to take me around, since I hadn't done any reading on the history of the place and figured it would be worth learning about.  (I hired an English guide, but I practiced some of my Chinese on her!)  She was just  little slip of a Chinese woman, but it was amazing how she could slip through crowds!  The place was jam packed, of course, and she was continually having to stop to wait for me to catch up.

I lost track of the number of times I had my picture taken.  Maybe 15 or 20 times, and that was just the people who actually came up to me and asked (I caught more than a few sneaking pictures).  A young girl from Inner Mongolia followed me around for about 20 minutes practicing her English, and another young group of girls told me I was "Really cool" when I answered them back in Chinese.  I'm going to be really depressed when I get back to Canada and I'm not "special" any more :-(

Even though the place was packed I didn't see too many other foreigners, maybe a dozen.  Although I know there was at least one other Canadian there.  Before I went into the park a little kid ran up to me babbling in English, and then handed me a paper to sign.  His teacher was with him and explained he was in an English program and this was his homework.  When I signed "Ian Costanzo, Canada" I noticed that another Canadian had already signed his sheet.  However this other Canadian had a Chinese name.  At any rate as usual on this trip I was one of the main attractions at the Grottos.

I took a million pictures (of course) so once I have  chance to weed through them I'll post pics and some more information on the caves.

I met my new friend 陈克强 (Chen Keqiang) for dinner and we went for Hot Pot.  He brought along a friend (Xiao something, I asked him to write it down but I think he was shy).  Between my poor Chinese and his poor English the conversation was pretty limited, but we had lots of Luoyang beer and therefore  good time!  Keqiang has invited me over over to his place for a meal next time I'm in Luoyang.

There, that should take care of everyone's addiction to food photos.

洛阳牡丹花 (The Peony Festival in Luoyang)

I had a scare when I got up this morning and looked out the window - the smog looked even worse than yesterday.  You can kind of see the sun trying to peek through.

And I had an even bigger scare at the breakfast buffet in my hotel (included with my room :-)) - NO COFFEE!!!  Fortunately I found a western-style cafe in a mall near the hotel.  30 RMB for a coffee, no wonder I was the only customer!

The hotel staff recommended that I go to the Luoyang Peony Park to see the flowers (number 51 bus), but I decided to walk to the China National Flower Park instead, as it was closer and larger.  The flowers were quite spectacular, although many were dying off.  I think I just managed to hit the tail end of the festival.  Here are a few pictures of the park.  I think that the flowers are quite pretty even in death ...

I brought my pollution mask with me today, although I opted not to wear it.  I figure that I'm an ambassador of sorts, since I'm likely the only Canadian most of these people will ever meet.  I think wearing the mask makes me look kind of sinister and unapproachable!  So I snuck it out when no one was around to take some deep breaths.  Yes I could tell the difference breathing through the mask and not.

I wandered home along the same route as yesterday.  There were some interesting street scenes and I wanted a couple more pictures:

Anyways the locals were all very friendly.  One even stopped his car and didn't run me over as I was standing in the middle of the road taking the above picture.  (Although they all had a good laugh over it.)  I got another offer of a ride (hop on my bike, I'll take you somewhere) - I'm not sure if it's some kind of scam or if they just get a kick of driving foreign tourists around.

Another of the locals was very excited to see me.  He's studied English and was pleased he could try out a few lines on me (much the same as I'm doing!) so he invited me to sit down and chat with him and his friends, and he even gave me an iced tea (which was welcomed because it's stinkin hot here).  Long story short we're now good buddies and meeting for dinner tomorrow night.  We're going to practice English and Chinese on each other lol.  I told him I also needed to take a picture for my blog just to prove I've actually made friends over here.

I was feeling a bit under the weather when I got back to the hotel, I guess breathing all the smog is catching up to me, so I've just lazed around most of the day.  Like I'm on holidays or something.  I just had dinner at the hotel - I wish I remembered to bring my camera, because it was called "shrimp 2 ways" or something like that, and it was literally two little piles of shrimp - on the one side the tails, and on the other the heads, deep fried.  Pretty good actually!  It was advertised as Sichuan cuisine, so I was expecting a bit of a bite (which it didn't have) but otherwise very tasty!

My first day in Luoyang (a.k.a. I hope the air in rest of China isn't like this!)

Luoyang is a very pretty city, there is lots of green space, and the architecture is as interesting and varied as Beijing.  However this is the worst pollution I've ever experienced in my life, by far, and I've been in Beijing on a "310" day.  I wandered about for about 2 or 3 hours and now my eyes hurt, my lungs hurt, I have a headache (I don't think it's hangover from the hangover) and I'm blowing (censored) out of my nose.

I didn't see any of the locals wearing pollution masks, so I thought it might not be all that bad (and I didn't want to start out my visit with a rude impression) so I went out without mine.  Big mistake, and it won't happen again, and I don't care if they think I'm rude wearing my mask in their lovely city.  I might even wear my swim goggles as well.

However I did have a few very good interactions with the locals (which may not have happened if I had been wearing my mask).  I was getting a LOT of stares, I'm not sure if I was sticking out because I was carrying around a giant tourist map, or if there was some other reason I was sticking out.  I said "ni hao" to everybody, and some said "ni hao" back and some even said "Hello!"  A few asked where I was from ("Canada?  Never heard of it."  "You've heard of America, right?  It's just to the north."  Seriously.)  On guy on a scooter even offered me a lift, unfortunately I couldn't think of anywhere for him to take me.  "wo jiu guang guang, I said.  (Just wandering aimlessly about.)

A small group of kids (maybe 14 or 15 years old) approached me, very excited.  They'd been studying English and never had a chance to talk to a real English person before.  So I humoured them with some English and even showed off a bit of my Chinese.  (Other than these kids, for the most part these Luoyangers and I are having a lot of trouble understanding each other.)

Here are some Luoyang pics:

No pineapple beer but I found the next best thing.  I don't think this will catch on though.

I couldn't find a good place to eat so I wound up in a mall eating fast food.  Afterwards I found the Luoyang version of "Gui Jie", so tomorrow I should have better food pics.

Kind of a Chinese Space Needle or CN Tower.  I wandered around the base of the tower.  In any other country you would be able to go to the top and have an expensive meal or cocktail, but here it's just a communications tower :-(

Lots of green space, too bad about all the smog :-(

Tania will probably think this one is fake too!  But it's not.

The Fast Train from Beijing to Luoyang

I mentioned my dream about missing my train.  Well, of course I got up early to leave plenty of time, and got to the station about 2 hours early.  I was planning to take the subway (the closest stop is pretty close to the train station) however once I got outside with all my packs I decided to heck with it and hailed a cab.  Even so, it was almost an hour door-to-door by the time I got to Beijing West, the Biggest Train Station in Asia.  (Everything here is The Biggest.)

(By the way, the taxi driver had a lot of problems understanding where I wanted to go, even though you would think "bei jing xi zhan" would be pretty easy to understand.  "I don't understand," he said to me.  "Huo che zhan, bei jing xi," I repeated.  "Oh!  Bei jing XI."  Sheesh, all these lessons and I can't even pronounce "xi", which means "West" and is one of the first words you learn in Chinese.)

The train looks like it's from outer space.  It's top speed today was 306 km/h.

Here are some pics from the trip:

Two things to say about these pics: (1) pollution, and (2) construction boom.

(1) Pollution.  Remember "污染" ("wu ran")?  Well the wu ran got thicker and thicker, until by the time we got to Luoyang it was just a thick grey fog blanketing just about everything.  Do these people never see the sun in this part of the world?  It's depressing!  The Luoyang'ers weren't even wearing pollution masks, I think I saw maybe one or two people on scooters wearing masks but that's it.  You hear a lot about pollution counts in Beijing, but that's only because the US Embassy is publishing the figures.  In the rest of the country the government isn't going to say.  But I can tell you that in Luoyang today it was much worse than I've ever experienced in Beijing, even on the day it hit 310.

(2) Construction Boom.  There are massive numbers of apartment blocks everywhere in China, and in pretty much every city we passed through on the train, massive numbers of new buildings being constructed.  In some cases new blocks of 10 or more buildings are being constructed.  I lost count of the number of cranes and number of new buildings we passed.  Are they really expecting that much growth?  Or are they preparing for some kind of massive migration in the future?  There is no signs of any kind of economic slowdown in China!

And finally, a pic of me with one of my seatmates from the trip.  No big deal :-)

His (or her) mom was helping me with my Chinese characters during the trip, so I helped while she was packing up at her stop :-)

In my next post I'll talk about Luoyang, my shitty hotel (sorry for the language but there's no mincing words on this one), the shitty quality of the air here (sorry again) and my adventures talking to the locals!  (I think I'm the only foreigner in town right now, and possibly the only one ever.  And I'll be happy if I can find even one local who's ever heard of Canada.)