洛阳 (Luo Yang)

Last week we all went to 洛阳 (Luo Yang), which used to be the capital of China and was very important to the development of Buddhism in China. We visited the grottoes at Longmen park, which were really cool. Unfortunately, the largest Buddha in the grottoes was under construction. That particular Buddha was modeled after Empress Wu from the Tang dynasty (she was a major supporter of Buddhism). So I don't have any photos of that Buddha. But I do have this:



Another Buddhist site we visited was 白妈寺 (Bai Ma Se, White Horse Temple), which is one of the oldest Buddhist temples in the world. The temple was first built almost 2,000 years ago but has been redone several times since then. It was really peaceful to walk around there - I never really get tired of Buddhist temples, no matter how many I go to.

We also went to a Shaolin Temple, where we saw a performance by some of the monks there. During the show, they call for three volunteers to compete against each other on stage. Chris and Patrick both volunteered and Chris actually won. We also got an awesomely funny photo of all of us together, posing with some of the monks. I will definitely look to Marshmallow on rainy days, ahaha.


In addition to going to the Shaolin temple (which is actually also a school), we went to another kung fu school, where a young man who used to be a student there spoke to us. He, like most of the other students, had been sent there at a young age. They train every day, live together the school, and hardly ever get to leave or see their families. Life is very rough for them.

After training for many years, a lot of the students go on to be body guards or find other such work, but they eventually become too old for this kind of work. As they generally do not have any other skills, they have a lot of trouble finding work. The young man we spoke to was an exception in that he left the school when he was eighteen years old and went to college. He's going to pursue his PhD in Beijing, which is a major achievement for someone of his background.

While at the school, we had a short impromptu lesson in kung fu. Crystal and I were partnered up, with a young girl as our teacher. She was really good and unfortunately my body simply could not handle some of the moves. At one point, we were supposed to assume a sort-of squatted position but I was not stretching low enough so she nudged me down into the proper position and my legs just kind of gave out.

Also, while in Luoyang, I bought Tin Tin comic that had been translated into Chinese. I love finding things like that here and the writing is simple enough that I can read most of it and look up the rest.