I lost my blue pen yesterday, so now I am using the black
one the school gave me.
We are now at 龙门 (Dragon
gate) Grottoes.
I heard a Chinese tour guide say that 80% of all the statues
here are missing their heads, arms, or broken in some other way. The heads and
arms are gone because people used to come here to take them away as gifts. I
think that this act is very disrespectful to both the religion and the artists
that made them.
Basically, there are lots of holes in the side of the
mountain cliff. The holes are full of statues of Buddha. There are probably
stories behind every one of them, but I don’t know any. There are statues are
made into all different sizes.
These carvings helped them to remember the stories that they
had to remember. If I would have known what the statues represent, it might
have been more interesting. Seeing these statue are interesting too, I’m just
saying that I would have been more interesting.
The peony flowers are very beautiful, even though I have not
seen any here yet, the pictures I have seen are really pretty. They have petals
that are lightly coloured pink, with a yellow middle. Their petals are fairly
spread out, which makes them look bigger.
~
I found out that peonies are not just light pink, but all
sorts different colours.
After the grottoes, we went to fly kites outside the LuoYang
Museum. We got to each decorate our own kite. Mine was stripped dark blue and
green with a treble clef in the middle. That was a lot of fun since I hadn’t
flown a kite in a long time.
Then we went into the LuoYang Museum, which had everything
about the history of LuoYang, which was very interesting. I also bought, at the
gift shop, four coasters picturing the Great Wall in four different seasons. I
thought that was cool because there are four people in my family.
After that we took the bus to go to an International School.
First we listened to a welcome speech from the vice principal, then the
teachers and parents from QSI introduced themselves. It was very funny when
Mrs. Li introduced herself in Chinese and everyone started clapping, and then right
after, Mr. Vernon had to say, “Sorry, I don’t speak Chinese”.
Anyway, after that we got split into groups to go and meet
the Chinese students. When we got to the classroom they first asked us
questions but then we got to mingle with them for a little bit. I mainly stayed
with a group of five girls who were really nice. After a while we had to go
back downstairs cause our school was going to play a basketball game against the
other school. During that time I heard people complaining about how the Chinese
students were asking them stupid questions. I don’t think that’s fair because
these students have probably not been outside of LuoYang before, they don’t
know how we live, so they don’t know if they are asking silly questions of not.
After we left the school, we went to the night market. Me,
Anna (friend), Madelyn, Hanako, and Yuxuan (friend) all went together. First we
thought we were lost because we had not seen anyone else from QSI, but then we
went back to find someone we knew. We found Mr. Vernon, Mrs. D, and Mrs. Li,
and they said we were going the right way. We ended up eating at a noodle
kitchen with Mr. Vernon. We had two small bowls of hun dun (wontons) and two
small bowls of dao xiao mian (knife cut noodles). They were really good. Over the
course of the meal, Mr. Vernon had called us Machiavelli, ad I have not yet figured
out why, but I have a couple of hunches. After we finished, we walked to meet
everyone at the West gate. Some people got lost, so we had to wait a little
longer before going to the hotel.
The rest of the evening I spent reading “The No.1 Ladies’
Detective Agency”.
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