Luoyang

Saturday, March 21:  Mike and I taxied through predawn Kaifeng to the train station.  We sat with a jolly conductor and who put his hat on Mike for this picture.  The big train station opened to clean paved streets with traffic guards even in the bicycle lanes.  We could tell we were in a much more prosperous town than rugged old Kaifeng.

Mike used his Chinese throughout the day to navigate Luoyang.  We first took a bus to White Horse Temple, the first Buddhist temple in China.  Though it may sound like sacrilege, I'm beginning to see a certain amount of repetition in the temples, at least in this area.  They're all laid out pretty much the same and feature the same small rooms dominated by images of Buddha et. al.  The grounds of White Horse are much larger than usual and there is a large Indian stupa of recent construction, probably a gift.  There was a pretty garden area with a pond where I fed the fish and turtles.

We bussed back downtown for lunch, when we sampled some of the local specialties.  Luoyang was once an imperial capital, as was Kaifeng.  We had some fantastic mushroom soup and something made of sweet potato that was somewhere between a soup and a puddng, both great, and finished with Luoyang Yan Cai, a famous dish originally made with a radish presented to a Tang Dynasty empress about 1,500 years ago.

In the afternoon we went to Longmen Grottoes, where work began in the 5th century on chiseling Buddhist images into mountainsides.  There are thousands of carvings, some small and a few mammoth.  

We returned to Kaifeng after dinner, arriving back in the apartment before midnight after a long day of memorable sightseeing.  For pictures go to  http://picasaweb.google.com/PackLitePaul and open the Luoyang album.  Click the Slideshow button for full captions.  More signage is included!