Giant Buddhas and Precarious Monasteries
These past few days have been awesome. We took a train from Beijing to Datong, a very industrial city without much natural beauty. Our hostel was right next to a coal burning facility. The countryside around the city was gorgeous, with farms and fields and milk cows pulling carts loaded precariously full of produce. We visited the yungang grottoes. They were a series of 20+ amazing man-dug caves, full of thousands and thousands of Buddhas, big, small and miniscule. One Buddha was even 17 meters tall- an absolutely breathtaking monument.The next day after the grottoes, we went to see the hanging monastery. I can’t even describe how it felt to walk up to the side of a vertical cliff and look up to see an entire building perched on its wall. It was breathtaking and astonishing to walk on it. And terrifying. My best guess as to why it was built on the side of a cliff would be to avoid flooding from the nearby river. How it was done, I have no clue.That same day, we took a 16 hour train ride to Xi’an. Beibei ‘reserved’ 4 tickets the day before, and at 5:20 pm we were waiting in our hostel lobby for our tickets to be delivered for our 5:48 pm train ride. I don’t know why they had to be delivered. The lady finally came and gave us 3 tickets. What happened to the 4th one? I don’t know. All I know is that we made a mad rush to the station and underwent a lot of confusion as Beibei talked to several official-looking men outside the gates in Chinese. After 10 stressful minutes we finally went to board the train, Beibei sans ticket. Later we learned that he bribed the men with 300 Yuen to let him board. Hey, it worked. I spent most of the ride sleeping. On the top bunk of 3, I was sweltering hot and the fan mysteriously stopped working an hour into the train ride. Miserable is a nice way to put it. We arrived in Xi’an yesterday morning. We found a really great youth hostel, Ludao. It has very friendly staff and clean rooms, and all over the walls people have written and doodled to their hearts’ extent. The writing on the wall ranges from signatures to funny sayings to advice on Xi’an and deep quotes. I drew a coffee cup and wrote “greetings from Seattle”. 🙂 We spent the day wandering around the city and ended up in the Muslim quarter. Gustav bought a painting and I just wandered around the giant market.
Not entirely sure what’s going on today, but it will be fun!
Tags: China, Travel
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