We got a late start today, because yesterday was so long. Thankfully the weather is much drier and cooler. This morning we started with the Shaolin Temple. This temple was similar to some of the other temples in that the people worshipped Buddha (Buddha statues always seem to come in groups of 3), but this temple was also a training school for martial arts. We saw lots of impressive demonstrations, including a student who broke a steel bar across his head and another who threw a needle through a piece of glass. When they asked for volunteers, one of our students went up on-stage to try to learn a complicated move.
We took a walk through the Pagoda Forest. This is essentially a cemetery with many different sizes and shapes of pagodas. The ones built with bricks were much “newer,” while the ones built with stones were older. The number of tiers or levels on a pagoda is always an odd number and it is directly related to a person’s age and his years of service. The most common is a 5-tier pagoda.
In the evening, we went to an outdoor Chinese show (kind of like our Muny or Starlight Theaters). There were 5 “acts” to this musical show – water, wood, wind, light, and stone. They literally used water, wood, and stone to make some of the “music.” The theater was nestled in the mountains, so it was a beautiful backdrop for the stage; but for the finale, they shined lights on the top of the center mountain in such a way that it looked like a giant Buddha.
After the outdoor show, we got on the bus and drove for a couple hours across the central plains to Kaifeng. We couldn’t see anything along the way (actually most people slept), but we finally got to our hotel – one of the nicest ones yet, especially by Chinese standards.
