Day 8

Today was a free day and we elected to go see the Longmen Grottoes outside the city of Luoyang.  It was incredible.  Luoyang was the capital city of China for 13 dynasties before being relocated to Beijing.  The Grottoes were carved over four centuries in four distinct phases starting in the year 493.  They were carved into the side of two mountains separated by the Yi River (pronouned ee) from limestone and originally were painted in various colors which really isn't visible now.  The grottoes are in various sizes and some sculptures are smaller than your hand.  Time has worn on the sculptures and some have been vandalized but the beauty is still intact.  Just imagining the hundreds of workers that it required to do the work and even the height at which they had to work is amazing.  There are more than 100,000 Buddhist statues carvings and 60 pagodas.  Buddhist monks and believers would come to the grottoes to worship.  Without further explanation, I'll let the pictures show the rest.

This boy travels well.  He always falls asleep in the car.  Makes it easy on us.

Notice the smog.  The smog was totally killing my pictures today.

Nuclear power is very important in China.  We've seen many of these.  Here there are actually five but in a moving van, we got a picture of three on our way to the Grottoes.

The sign says Longmen but it reads from right to left as was proper in ancient China.  However today, Chinese read left to right.

How do you beat the heat and carry Jordy?  This proved to be an effective solution.

I love the flower in the ceiling.  It's beautiful.

Such a cool picture of the grottoes, the Yi River, and the boat ferry.

These are the steps up to the largest carvings.  Well worth the climb but it was so hot that we nearly died making the climb.  Again, totally worth it.  Once in a lifetime opportunity.

I love art and to me, it just doesn't get much better than this.  Incredible!

This picture gives you perspective on just how large these really are.

A look down from above.  Our guide is standing with our stroller under the shade of a weeping willow.

An excellent view of the Yi River.

We are taking a boat ferry back because it's too stinkin' hot to walk anymore.

A look at a boat ferry.

Tell me that this isn't breathtaking.  I dare you!

You can see the pagodas on the side of the opposite mountain but we didn't quite make it to them.  I'll be honest, I was feeling a little dizzy and dehydrated after the climbing we had already done.

The pagodas up close.

This was our driver for the day that found this wonderful traditional restaurant to eat at and our guide "Tina" is sitting next to him.  They gave us a wonderfully air conditioned private room.  We ordered four dishes which you share on a spinning circle in the middle.  It's called family style.

Words cannot express how good this dish was.  The white noodles are actually a crunchy hollow root vegetable.  This has been one of my favorites thus far.

This was also amazing.  The brown noodle things are actually tall and skinny mushrooms that don't taste like mushroom.

This is fried eggplant in a sweet sauce.  Oh. My. Word.  This was the best of all we ate.  I wish I could duplicate this at home.

This turned to be a bad choice.  It tasted awesome and was spicy but the meat wasn't boneless.  You had to eat the meat off of the bone and the pieces weren't very big to begin with.  Craziness.

After stuffing ourselves to the gills, we were back on the road home.  Tina is such a wealth of information.  She shared with us on the way to the Grottoes that it is common in China for people to live in caves.  What?  She said that the older population does it more than young ones.  The caves stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter and they DO have electricity.  I was stunned but then I saw it on the side of the mountains.  Check out the pictures of our drive home.

This is a terrible picture but we had to show you that this is common for two rows of cars to be stacked on top of a car trailer.  This wouldn't fly in the US.

Here you can see there are entry ways and windows.

More windows.

Up in the right hand corner is a window.

Our fruit try for the day.  These are larger than golf balls and about the size of a plum.  You sort of crack it like an egg shell on the outside and peel it back.

The inside has these little wedges that you eat.  They are very squishy but quite tasty and one of them contained a pit.  Not really worth while when you do all that work for such a small portion but it truly was a tasty fruit.  One thumb up for this fruit.  Many of the fruits we have tried do not have an English translation that we could understand.  Otherwise, we would happily share.

That's all for tonight.  Tomorrow, we leave Zhengzhou and head for Guangzhou and then it's US bound on Thursday.  Keep us in your prayers as we travel by plane to our next destination for our consulate appointment.