VISIT TO SHANGXI PROVINCE

Our last chance to travel before our return home from China was during the annual Dragon Boat Festival celebrated in early June in China.  The date varies yearly and is the 5th day of the 5th month of the lunar calendar.  The celebrations included eating rice dumpling and racing dragon boats.  We ate rice dumplings (we were not too taken!) but we didn't race dragon boats.  Our travels took us to the Shanxi Province West of Shandong where we have been teaching.  We flew to the capitol city of Taiyuan which is a relatively small city of 4.3 million.  It is the capitol of the province.  From there we took a bus tour with about 10 other BYU teachers and saw some wonderful sights including the old town of Pinguao, the hanging Buddhist/Taoist/Confucian temple at Hengshan and the Yuangang Buddhist Grottoes.  Connections in and out of Taiyuan were tough and we ended up taking a soft sleeper train ride back to Jinan.  Below are some pictures and story of our adventure. 

Sue at the ancient city wall around the old city of Pingyao.

Shanxi Province in know for its noodles.  This lady is cutting noodles from a cake.  It was very interesting to see them make the various kinds of noodles.  We tried several and they were all very good.

These are what we call Chinese Pancakes.  They are fried dough with sesame seeds and a sweet sorghum type of filling.  They were good right off the grill!

This was a really fun shopping town for Chinese souvenirs and ethno-junk.  You can see us walking down the street here.  We got three brass bells to hang on our deck at home. 

Sue enjoying the sites at Pingyao

This is the hanging temple at Hengshan.  It was built about 1500 years ago and is a Buddhist as well as Taoist and Confucian Temple.  We figured if it has stayed up on the canyon wall this long it could probably make it through us climbing on it.  In Buddhism, the higher them temple the better.....closer to heaven I guess! [Image] Here we are before our climb. 

 A view from the top.  It's a long way down!

Here we are at the top!

After the hanging temple we visited the Yuangang Buddhist Grottoes.  They were built/dug/carved by the Chinese Emperors during the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534 AD) or about 1500 years ago.  These somehow survived the cultural revolution of the 1960s fairly well intact.  We did see some damage attributed to that however.

Smaller caves or grottoes

Here we are at the nicest looking Buddha. Notice the nice earlobes.

For the trip home we were not able to get a flight so we took a "soft sleeper" train back.  It was quite comfortable but a little rocky and noisy at times.  We stopped several times.  It took us about 7 hours to get home but we slept most of the way.  We both had lower bunk tickets.

All in all, it was a very nice trip!