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The other China
Entry 9 of 10 | show all | print this entry |
After the Great Wall we took the train to Datong, which took about 5 hours. The hotel, Yungang International Hotel, was pretty nice for the price (about $60 US per room) but the service was bad. Why can't Chinese hotels learn to take a large enough authorization on your card so they don't have to bother you all the time for another one? "Can you please come downstairs at 10 PM and bring us your credit card?" Uh, no.
We got there late, but we were hungry and the hotel restaurant was closed, so we went to find another place. We ended up at some place with a buffet, dim sum, and a menu, but we didn't eat much. Still, 4 plates came to $2 US. No shit things are cheaper in the provinces than on the coast!
The first day we went to the Hanging Monastery, which is about 70 KM from town. This place was really impressive. It has been there since the Tang dynasty, but it has been refurbished later so you never know what was new and what was old. I hated that in Beijing. They redid everything so you never could tell if something was a week or a century or 5 centuries old. Anyway, the walkways were narrow! I guess when you build a monastery on stilts in a concave cliff face you are kind of limited in size, but it was a little sketchy to walk around at times. The statues were really cool and many were from the early Ming, but their eyes had been gouged out in the Cultural Revolution. I guess Red Guards were really going apeshit in Shanxi at that time because we saw a lot of vandalism on these historical sights.
After the monastery we went to the Yungang Caves, which are a UNESCO sight for a reason. They were awesome! They were all carved out of a cliff face from nothing, and some had 70-foot or taller Buddhas in them, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of carvings and paintings, even in the ceilings. The paintings in some caves are in really good shape, but some are not doing so hot. The pollution in Datong is horrible, so that can't be helping. These, too had been hit by vandals, and a lot of the eyes of these Buddhas carved in the 400s or 500s AD had been gouged out. I guess the Red Guards were like the Chinese Taliban at that time. I think I would have made the trip to Datong just to see these caves and go home. Do not miss them if you have the chance to see them.
The guy that drove us to the monastery and the caves bought us a watermelon on the way back for 20 cents! When I told him the same melon would have been $5 at home he freaked out. I am glad I didn't tell him how much they cost in Japan. He was really funny. He told us they call the cops dogs. When we told him we call them pigs he nearly fell out of the car laughing. He and my dad kept saying "pig" and "dog" in Chinese (well, my dad tried), so they got to calling the cops "pigdogs." Schweinhund!
The countryside on the way to the monastery was really interesting. You can really see in Shanxi what people are talking about when they say China is two different countries and why rural people are so pissed off at the ineuqality brought about by the economic development going on. People are living in mud huts in horrible pollution with no money while people in Shanghai are spending a month's worth of the average rural salary on a plate of spaghetti and some ridiculous drink at Starbucks.
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