4/30: Luoyang, Longmen Caves

Hey folks, I'm getting to that part of travels when I'm just kind of wiggy and sick of it all, and ready to pack it in. Still seeing some amazing stuff though, and today's no exception.

Not a huge fan of Luoyang, though not exactly a hater of the city either. My main impression has been a recurring shock on just how many identical looking big cities China has. Luoyang has six million people, tons of department stores, muslim restaurants, traffic filled streets and a complex bus system...which makes it pretty much exactly the same as dozens of other cities in China. There's not a tremendous amount of character, although I hear the old city is quite nice. I wonder if my craving for the unique flavors of American cities is just a general symptom of homesickness blinding my cultural sensitivity, or if I'm right on, and China just has too many medium sized cities that have been built to look exactly the same.

Today, before I stepped into the shower, the hostel owner said, "You have so much hair!" Used to these sort of no-filter statements from the Chinese, I just kind of nodded and said, yes, yes I do. Then the hostel owner proclaimed me the "monkey king" and lifted my shirt to look at all my hair. I was pretty much at a loss for what to do then, and I'm kind of still at a loss.

I'm positively filthy at this point, btw. I've been wearing the same old clothes for two weeks, up to and including old underwear. Today, I had some super greasy baozi that squirted oil all ove me, and napkinless, I was just a huge grease ball all day. The brutal Henan heat has me sweating like a pig. I'm really just disgusting, and it's beginning to wear on me.

The bus ride to the Longmen Caves was pretty long, about an hour and a half, but fairly painless thanks to the very clear directions the hostel owner gave me. The Longmen Caves are really quite something, thousands of caves filled with Buddhist stone carvings dotting a hillside, some dating back to the 400s AD. It's quite a spectacle: some stone Buddhas are two stories high, some are surrounded by thousands of intricate bas-relief Buddhas, and some are distinguished by exquisite, intricate levels of relief. The sad thing is that the majority of the caves are in awful condition, thanks to years of looting by collectors from, um, America, and Chinese vandals from the Tang Dynasty to the Cultural Revolution. I can't imagine what it was like when it was brand new, from the faint tracings of paint on the cave walls, it must have been incredibly spectacular.

Unfortunately, I also got a stalker at the Longmen Caves, which was not fun. Usually, I'm perfectly willing to indulge the Chinese in their general curiosity concerning westerners and the West, but when I'm looking at art, I almost always prefer to be left alone. At the Longmen Caves, I quickly realized that what began as the usual small talk with a Chinese person learning English was becoming a long, boring conversation I couldn't shake. I successfully dodged this guy for the main series of caves, but was stuck with his "tour" in the last few temples on the other side of the river. He tried to engage me on a hilariously broad range of topics in American culture I have virtually no interest in: from the NBA, to Windows XP, to Prison Break, to the Backstreet Boys. He also had the brainwashed Chinese nationalist viewpoint I have little time for: "China must be strong to prevent foreigners from ever taking advantage of the country again" (a somewhat awkward view for me to deal with considering some Buddha heads from Longmen are in the Met). On one hand, I am perfectly willing to admit the wrongs done to China, but very rarely does this litany of wrongs come with the admission that much Chinese misery has very directly resulted from the Chinese fighting themselves. For example, I readily admitted that it was awful what American looters did to the caves, but I also felt obligated to point out that some of the worst vandalism occured during the Cultural Revolution. There is very little open self-reflection or self-criticism on the part of the Chinese. And then, again came the raw hatred of the Japanese. I usually kind of nod along with it when it comes up, because what the Japanese did was awful, and I feel like I have no right to tell the Chinese how to feel. But the extent to which the Chinese government uses this feeling to manipulate the populace really disturbs me: it's a constantly stoked anti-Japanese fervor that can only end badly. This time, I tried softly to convince him that maybe it isn't right to blame the sons for the crimes of the father, using the example of the holocaust and my attitude towards the Germans as a door in, but once again, that oft repeated line: "we can never forgive them". Sometimes, I really feel like China's warped psyche, born out of a deeply wounded national ego, will lead to some very terrible things down the line.

I shook the guy off by jumping the bus and explaining I don't have a cell phone here, and stumbled around Luoyang's downtown, searching for a duck restaurant I never found, and finally just crawled into an empty restaurant, starving. Craving duck, I ordered the first duck thing I saw on the menu. When a plate of cylindrical duck parts came to the table, I just started eating it while at the same time trying to figure out what part of the duck would have this shape. After counting vertebrae, it hit me: I had ordered a plate of duck necks. They tasted fine, and I suppose the neck is no stranger part of the duck to eat than any other. But man, sometimes I miss good ol' General Tso's Chicken.

Well, if you haven't noticed, I'm totally exhausted. I enter the 36 chambers of the Shaolin temple tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. I'm feeling a bit homesick, and miss all you guys. I'll check in tomorrow, take care.