Still in China Luoyang/Beijing

I'm still in China. Three days of meetings and seven days of travel. Makes no sense, especially when the meetings are a waste of time and I'm away from Ceili for 10 days during one of the most enjoyable times of her life.

I'm in Beijing today. Travelled from Luoyang this morning. Just by chance, the taxi driver that picked me up was the same taxi driver that drove me to the Longmen Grottoes and the White Horse Temple back in September. It cost 200 yen ($30 cdn) to hire him and his car for 8 hours and about 200 km of driving. He did get me last time because he charged me 100 yen to drive me to the airport the next day. Today he only charged me 50, so he got an extra 50 out of me last time.

On a related note, the Chinese just don't seem to know when to stop. I bought three custom tailored dress shirts for 300 yen today ($45). I told her I wanted the shirts delivered to my hotel before agreeing to the price. I didn't even negotiate the price, which means I paid way too much (usually you can get 50% 0ff). She knew she got a great price out of me but, when I was leaving, she just had to try and get another 30 yen out of me for delivery. I laughed at her and told her what I thought.

Then tonight I went for dinner in the Kempinski hotel where I am supposedly a "guest". This place charges 10 times more than it should for a meal (a small dinner of sushi cost 300 yen - the same as three custom tailored shirts that I paid 100% too much for). Anyway, after getting ripped off by the hotel's advertised meal price, they had the nerve to demand a 15% "service fee" be added onto the bill when I tried to pay. Not advertised anywhere on the menu. They already got 1000% too much and they want another 15%. Then they wonder why we get mad.

The above examples are just minor examples of what happens during our meetings.

Anyway, enough venting. Today I went for a swim in the hotel pool. It was actually pretty nice, and it felt great to do something almost "healthy" instead of just sitting and eating. "Healthy" is in quotes because I'm not sure you want to breathe more of this air than you absolutely have to. I felt great afterwards and decided to walk to the tailor shop instead of taking a taxi (by walking there is less chance of getting ripped off by a taxi driver, but probably more chance of dying in a horrible traffic accident - see pedestrian eviserator below). After 15 minutes of brisk walking my nose was clogged with exhaust soot and dust and I felt just as crappy as I did when I left Luoyang.

Yesterday we had a day off and travelled to the Shaolin Temple, the home of Kung Fu (Gung Fu?) It was a pretty good trip. I enjoyed my trip to the White Horse Temple in September better because the White Horse temple has a relaxed "monkish" feel to it. The monks there seem contemplative and the site is mostly peacful (except for the car horns in the distance). The monks at the Shaolin temple are obviously incredible martial arts experts, but the place did not feel peaceful.

Anyway, here are a few pictures:

Driving to the temple was interesting because this part of China is very old. The landscape has been molded, sculpted, and modified by humans for thousands of years, leaving topography that is strange to my eye. Not only is everything terraced, but occasionally you get pieces of land that seem to have been left more virgin. These pieces are sometimes 5-10 metres higher in elevation than the surrounding area making it seem like the whole landscape has been scraped away over the millenia. The area around the Shaolin temple reminded me of Invermere in British Columbia.

When we first got to the temple, the wind was incredibly cold. The wind soon died down and the weather was cool but nice.

Here's a shot of me in front of the Pagoda Forest (the Monks are buried beneath the Pagodas). The number of levels on the Pagoda indicates the Monk's status.













Ewald, Ian, and Wu in the Pagoda Forest.
















I can't help but take pictures of kids. It's good luck to rub the turtle's head













I have no idea why there is a camel here. It was actually clean and well groomed.

Most of the temples here were destroyed in 1928 (war with Japan?) and have been recently rebuilt. The White Horse temple had much older buildings.







Some of us got sucked into beating on the drum. This was just before the Shaolin Monk martial arts performance. The performance was pretty good, but not as good as I expected.









We took the back route home, which passes over a mountain pass, then drops down through a coal mining/brick manufacturing area before joining up with the highway near the White Horse Temple. Here's a shot of some road construction on the mountain.

The coal mining area is quite astounding - lots of people with their own little coal mines / coal piles in there backyards. Lots of people also manufactured bricks/lime/refractory in their backyard burning some combination of wood and coal. The landscape was quite denuded near the road, and this is probably quite a terrible place to live, but not far off the road the landscape was green and quite nice.



These pictures were taken in Luoyang. You don't see many of these cars in Beijing. They are a Chinese car and come equipped with a pedestrian eviserator hood ornament.