Luoyang

I have too many pictures from Luoyang to put here, so I uploaded them to a Picasa web album--you'll be able to check them out better there.

Another girl on our trip took some really incredible photos, if you want to look at more; go here.

Our train ride was AMAZING. It was really fun to get to hang out with all the teachers, who are all (except one) Chinese girls in their twenties, so we could all be friends if given the chance--aka, our interactions not limited to those involving forced sentences using ridiculous vocabulary words, such as, "the company propagandized the item in the media in order to generate sales," or "women are restricted from entering the postman profession because of their inability to lift as many kilograms of mail," or, "The goal of the Women's Federation in Taiwan is to develop and promote female virtue and handicraft arts."

So we drank a bunch of beers on the train, and arrived in Luoyang on little sleep at 7 am. The first day we saw the temples, and at night partied with the teachers. The best part of the Buddhist temples was the Kung fu demonstration, where one monk placed two spear heads on his esophagus, then proceeded to bend the shafts of the spears in semicircles by leaning forward onto the spears; another monk bashed an iron bar over his head and it snapped into 5 pieces; and a third monks threw a pin through a pane of glass to pop a balloon on the other side. If I hadn't seen that with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. Their was only a little pin-hole in the glass, and he had thrown that pin from two feet away. Can somebody explain how that is possible??

The second day we saw the Longmen grottoes, which were incredible, then split up til it was time to take the train back. Some of us chose to hang out in a park, watch Sharon play the violin, and talk to Chinese who came around the stare at this crazy crowd of blond people and to listen to Sharon play.

We arrived back in BJ at 6 am Monday morning, after a truly exhausting weekend.