We started the day with a trip to the Tang Paradise, an ancient Chinese resort and royal garden. The landscape and buildings were breathtaking – much closer to what I expected a Chinese garden to look like. While we were there, we got to see 2 young boys doing the Lion Dance. Even though the temperatures were in the 90’s, the boys were wearing a large, loose-fitting costume of a red lion (one boy was the head and the other was the tail). They “danced” by jumping and landing on the tops of poles, totally in sync with each other. Sometimes the smaller boy in front would jump on the shoulders of the boy in the tail causing the lion to look like it was standing upright on its hind legs.
After lunch, we went to the train station. China has a really nice “bullet” train system (about half the speed of an airplane) that we took to our next city, Luoyang. The train made a few stops along the way, but a trip that would take 4 hours on a traditional train, only took us 1½ hours. The biggest stress was getting 16 people (8 of whom were teenagers with grossly oversized luggage) on and off the train quickly, because these trains don’t have long layovers. In the train station, Dr Tai arranged to have a porter to carry her bag onto the train, but then showed up with the other 15 of us in tow. Once again, we got to skip to the head of the line.
We were met in Luoyang by our local guide, who immediately whisked us off to the Longmen Grottoes, a Buddhist Cave Temple. This was an incredibly breathtaking place with literally thousands of Buddha’s carved into the limestone cliffs along the Yi River. Some were only 1 inch tall, while others were almost 6 stories tall. This area suffered a lot of damage during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 60’s, so a lot of the Buddha’s were missing their noses and hands. Even though we were tired from a long day of sightseeing and traveling, I was glad we visited this place in the late afternoon. There were very few people and it felt much cooler (only 107°F!).
Our last stop before dinner was to a paper cutting factory. They sat us all down with a square of red paper and a pair of scissors, and taught us how to cut out a butterfly. Obviously, their artwork on display was much finer than our attempts.
