Week 7 – Man who ride on Dragon bus is going to Qufu

So what did we get up to in Qufu then??? The home of Confucious, the seat of Oriental wisdom. We played Tekken on PS2 and made Confucious jokes, of course. And inexplicably I ate dumplings again. Damn things are addictive I tell you.

The kids enjoyed riding on horse and cart up to the forest and doing charcoal rubbings of the grave stones of all the wise men.

From there we went on the Zhengzhou where we visited the yellow river, and saw the big new statues that have been carved into a mountain here in the last few years, much like Mt Rushmore. In a way it seemed out of place with the centuries/millennium old sites we are seeing otherwise, but I guess these “visit worthy” sites have to start their lives sometime. Maybe people will be visiting here for millennium to come and will only be able to guess what and who the faces have looked down on over the years. Man am I getting deep here or what. Maybe some of those Qufu gravestones rubbed off on me.

But the real reason for stopping in Zhengzhou was because it is the launching pad for visiting Shoalin. That’s right Grasshoppers, the home of Kung Fu. You won’t believe the number of kids out here training. There were thousands. Someone said there are about 100,000 shoalin students. Not a bad size warrior army. Which is actually what makes Shaolin special. A long time again, one of the Shaolin monks saved the life of the emperor. In return, the monks were granted the right to bear arms and train in the martial arts. Normally anyone trying this kind of stuff would have been massacred for starting a revolution.

In honesty, I guess I was looking forward to this part of the trip more than anyone. In hindsight though, it was one of the stops that left the biggest impression on the kids. Jamie started practicing his moves before the demonstration was even finished. Skye went through all of he positions on the mural in the garden of the monastery and we could have made a fortune by passing the hat around as everyone stopped to watch the littlies. Even the monks were checking out some moves they had probably never seen before.

After Shoalin, we overnighted in a homestay in Laoyang. The guy who put us up rents out his available rooms to travellers. He was a really nice guy and despite this being the typical grey apartment highrise block scenario (carrying the bags up 7 flights was fun) the place had a real neighbourly/family feel about it. In the evening we played the cardgame with him that you see people playing on every corner, called Landlord. We also managed a round of poker, and am happy to report back to the “Aces” that all the training paid off and I won the asian leg of the poker world tour.

Just outside of town, we visited the Laoyang Grottos, were locals have been carving images of Buddha for centuries in little caves all along the valley. Despite it being quite impressive, I think at this stage we are all suffering a bit from ABC syndrome (Another Blood Carving/Church/Cathedral/City).