Sunday September 19th: One Day in Luoyang

-After finally getting a cab we went over to Li Jing Men. It's a big traditional gate that is typical in China. The gate is the entrance to the Laocheng area. It's literal meaning is 'the gate to beautiful scenery.' The area is a long street with lots of small and local businesses on it.

 I really felt like I was in China. In Beijing you often see other foreigners, but here there were no other tourists. We were it. The street had old pavements, lanterns all over, traditional Chinese food being cooked everywhere, roosters in cages on the back of bikes, stray dogs just walking around, bikes and cars honking their horns and ringing their bells.

We found a little shop that sold these beautiful Chinese boxes, Rachel and I each got one. We also discovered a market street, of course. It was this big, wide road, surrounded by lampposts with tons and tons of red little lanterns on them. Very chinese. I bought a few prezzies for people back home.

In China everyone with a cell phone (which is pretty much everyone- they love their cellphones here. And they have the best ringtones ever. Everyone, even the men, have these girly pop songs. A popular one is the Titanic song, I've never heard so much Titanic. Ok sorry about that side note), anyway, everyone with cellphones buys these little trinkets on strings that they attach to a little loop on the phone. To be truly Chinese we each bought one. I now have a fat, red, polk-a-dot cow on my cell phone. I love it.

We wandered some more and discovered this area that sold animals: turtles, chipmunks, hamsters, gerbils, hens, roosters, fish, dogs, cats, birds, rabbits. It was crazy. A lot of the time here they pump a bunch of hormones into the animals so that they stay small. So these rabbits are tiny! Like the size of your palm, it's so sad. And the dogs, oh the dogs. I literally was about to buy one that looked like a miniature polar bear. It was the cutest thing ever and I just felt so bad for it! It was very sad.

Fish for sale at the market, there were hundreds of these trays:

A giant lantern in the middle of the street?

Being Asian outside of McDonalds:

-We grabbed some lunch at the first restaurant we saw. I ordered something, had no clue what it was. They were yummy though, kind of like sesame buns with pumpkin/milk/sugar filling. We proceeded to take the bus back to the hotel, but unfortunately got off a little early so had to walk the rest of the way. A group of us then went to McDonalds, duh, for dinner before we left for the train. The McDonalds here is soooo good, but so bad because I eat way too much of it!

The intense hotel lobby light:

-Played Big Blue Moon on the bus ride to the train station. It is the most frustrating game ever, if you don't know it, we're playing it when I get back from China.

-On the way back we had hard sleepers. The difference is in hard sleepers there are 6 beds in a cabin, each bunk bed has 3 levels. There are no doors also. We were mixed in with locals and were all in different places. Only Rachel and I were in the same room, and I was mean and forced her to take the top bunk with me, I didn't want people sitting on my bed! Katie and Heather weren't together but luckily they managed to switch. The whole night they got to listen to a man constantly hocking in the toilet next to them. Hocking is disgusting, revolting, repulsive, nauseating, awful, rude, and should be banned from society. Who wants to hear each other spit up all that gross flemmy stuff? Not me.