Saturday September 18th: Shaolin Temple and Longmen Grottoes

-Woke up early when the train arrived. Took a bus to a hotel for breakfast. It was chinese food for breakfast. Not exactly the best.

Train Station:

-Drove to Shaolin Temple. It's a temple where kungfu is taught and mastered, and has been so for many, many dynasties. It has been burnt down twice, and only within the past 20-30 years has become a popular tourist destination. This is because of the film Shaolin Temple, starring Jet Li. Before the movie the temple and Jet Li were virtually unknown.

The bins at the temple:

Practicing their Kungfu

-Kungfu show = crazy. The guys broke metal rods with their heads, bent wood with their necks, pierced glass with a needle and popped a balloon on the other side. It was insane! Just seeing the amount of discipline that they put into everything. When we were walking to the temple we passed fields of young Chinese students practicing kung fu. They were all so focused and coordinated. We then spent a while walking around the temple area itself.

With the Kungfu people from the show:

One of the many temples:

- Pagoda Forest: A little further on from the temple. Under each pagoda monks are buried. Sometimes one monk has a whole pagoda to himself, other times multiple monks share one. It depends on their importance and discipline in their life. It really was quite amazing seeing all these giant pagodas.

-Lunch: Asian food, again. Enough said. The noodles were good though. And my peanut butter I brought with me.

-Longmen Grottoes: The grottoes were so cool. On both sides of the Yi river, Buddhist statues are sculpted into the side of the mountains. There are over 100,000 Buddhist images there. There was a lot of stairs that took you all the way to the top of the mountain. The whole time you just discover more and more caves and niches. The time it must have taken to sculpt these figures boggles me. Each one has so much detail. There were the huge main statues, and then on the walls there will be an area just covered in mini Buddhas, almost like a wallpaper print. I also find it interesting how their function has so dramatically changed, from religious practices to a tourist location. We spent a lot of the time watching this little kid sprint up all the stairs.
The Grottoes:

- Roasted Goose: Yep, that was the name of our restaurant for dinner. Family stlye chinese food. It wasn't too bad. It's not that I don't like all this food, I do! It's just I can't eat it for every meal, that is hard work! My stomach through a fit the first two weeks. The teachers came and sat at our table which immediately took the dinner from fun to super awkward. Yay. 

-Hotel and Night out: So Katie was my roomie at the hotel. I'm really surprised we haven't gotten sick of each other yet, or at least mad at each other. All the people on the trip hung out in Rachel's room then we went to this bar in town. It was quite funny, there were only local Asians in there, and then all us foreigners walked in. I made some Asian friends though!