I don’t remember when did I get up the next day, but I surely didn’t sleep well enough. The bed cracked whenever I turned, crack, crack crack! The night before we agreed to get up at 7 am, Kyle’s alarm rang at 7 and I sprung up :p Anyway, our first stop was the Longmen Grottoes. My notes didn’t help much in pointing us directions, Shane and Kyle’s guidebooks did a great job… I still don’t want to admit it!
That’s Kyle on the left and Shane on the right. People were staring at me when I was with them, did they all think I was a traitor? And obviously all of them wanted to rip us off! The Longmen Grottoes was so huge and serene (because of the cold and the lack of tourists at the time?), I was so impressed. In the picture you can see this BIG Buddha, Kyle and Shane are just too tall. There were too many damaged Buddhas, big and small…
So there were my 2 newly met friends, at first it was hard to understand what they were saying because of their Scottish/Irish accent, luckily I got used to it quickly. Those two young a*holes (pardon me) sometimes talked about me right in front of my beautiful face in a language I couldn’t understand! So rude! And they surely knew how to make good use of their heights to bully me! It wasn’t fair! Aw, I was so mad!
Hilarious picture :D Even the Buddha did the super Hong Kong stylish “V” sign :D We Hongkongers are so cool! There were some tourists groups following right behind us, it wasn’t really that agitating at the beginning, but once the guides took out their microphones, we really just wanted to kill them all! (How could they speak in some dialects which I couldn’t understand?) That’s outrageous! We waited till all those groups were gone and took some really amazing pictures with my super cool camera!
There were so many steps and too many Buddhas…
The best picture of the day (in my opinion anyway), very nice, no tourists in sight other than us, those Buddhas were amazingly enormous! How the only empress in Chinese history managed her people to get it done is of course beyond me, at that time my only thought was “this is so crazy”. If I were the empress, I’d definitely make better use of my human recourses.. like making my soldiers to seize all gold in India… may be?
The weather wasn’t really that good that day, and it was freezing cold. My mood was good and my head was sober. I had been travelling alone for a couple of days, I was so lonely at the time and was so glad to have some company. I was so weak, mentally. Though Kyle and Shane could be annoying sometimes, I really enjoyed our time together :) They were so childish but that made them unbelievably good travel companions.
I saw the sign and asked them “What does ‘Wast’ mean?” without reading the Chinese translation. WAST HILL! HAHA, Shane immediately corrected me. It was so hilarious, there came this great picture. If you look closely at Shane, you could see him smiling too!
This is how Longmen Grottoes looked like from across the river. You see the enormous Buddha in the middle of the picture? That was where we took our “Picture of the Day”! :)
In this temple we met the famous 18 Bronze Men (十八銅人). Actually there wasn’t much to see in this temple… except…
This MALE DO NOT sign located right outside the female washroom! HAHA! I just love China!
After Longmen, I wanted to go to Guanlin temple 關林 which was my last destination for Luoyang. I have already bought a train ticket back to Zhengzhou when I first arrived Luoyang, which left at around 16:20, but it was technically Kyle and Shane’s first day in Luoyang, so I thought they wouldn’t go to Guanlin with me but in the end they decided they would :D Thank Kyle for the ice creams (it was so beautiful to eat ice cream in the freezing winter!) :D (oh, I so want to write about this man sitting on the ice cream drop but I’d better not :p)
Haha I think this is another really beautiful picture with our Kungfu poses!
My handsome, young, and funny friends!
The shining, golden Guanyu Statue! Now you know why I wanted to come here :D I just love everything gold! It was very interesting to see a police man worshipping this statue, Hong Kong Police do that too, but why? What is the connection between Guanyu and the police??? Anyone knows this please fill me in!
Nice shot of Kyle :) My seventeen years old friend! He lied and told me he was 22! I only learned the truth after I came back to HK…… he surely looks young :) Hm, just like me! :p
This is the only shot I have of Shane smiling “normally” to my camera! He said he looks better without a beard and the reason why he had the beard was to keep his face warm. Hmmmmmmmm. No comment :p
The last picture of the day. The only thing worth noting was the player embedded in the…. thing :p How could I ever learn how to call those Chinese things in English? It was quite odd to see the player (CD player?) in such a holy (and golden) place like the Guanlin temple!!
Kyle and Shane saw me off in the train station and there we bid farewell. I wanted to have their contact numbers, but they didn’t have mobile phones with them… I truly appreciated their companionship in such a lonely time, they were really funny and I had a great time travelling with them. Even though just for one short day. We were all going to Shanlin Temple the next day, it really was up to fate to decide if we could meet again there then.
Bye for now, Kyle and Shane.
